With tolerable taxes,* no state debt and no interest to pay, England enjoyed a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity. The average labourer worked only 14 weeks and enjoyed 160 to 180 holidays. According to Lord William Leverhulme,** a writer of that time, “The men of the 15th century were very well paid”, in fact so well paid that the purchasing power of their wages and their standard of living would only be exceeded in the late 19th century. A labourer could provide for all the necessities his family required. They were well clothed in good woollen cloth and had plenty of meat and bread.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Anglo-German philosopher, confirms these living conditions in his The Foundations of the XIXth Century.
“In the thirteenth century, when the Teutonic races began to build their new world, the agriculturalist over nearly the whole of Europe was a freer man, with a more assured existence, than he is today; copyhold*** was the rule, so that England, for example – today a seat of landlordism – was even in the fifteenth century almost entirely in the hands of thousands of farmers, who were not only legal owners of their land, but possessed in addition far-reaching free rights to common pastures and woodlands.'#
*G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History, A Survey of Six Centuries Chaucer to Queen Victoria, Longmans Green and Co., London, 1948 writes that England was “a land whose people would not endure taxation” 63 and that “an obstinate refusal to pay taxes was a characteristic of the English at this period,” 107.
**R.K. Hoskins, War Cycles – Peace Cycles, The Virginian Publishing Company, Lynchburg, Virginia, 1985, 54.
***Copyhold was a form of manorial land rights which evolved from the system of serfdom.
#H.S. Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, The Bodley Head, London, 1912, Vol. II, 354-355.
End of a Golden Era
During the 17th century this golden era came to a tragic end. Large numbers of Jews, who had been expelled from Spain in 1492 by Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon* on account of their persistent involvement in usury and unethical business practices, had settled in Holland. Although the Dutch were at that time an important maritime power, the Jewish usurers based in Amsterdam desired to return to England, where their prospects for expanding the operations of their money- lending empire were far more promising.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) small numbers of Marranos-Spanish Jews, who had converted to a sham form of Christianity, settled in London. Many of them practised as goldsmiths, accepting deposits of gold for safe keeping, and then issuing ten times the amount of gold received as gold receipts, that is loans with interest. These receipts, a forerunner of the fraudulent fractional reserve system of banking, were initially lent to the Crown or Treasury at 8% per annum, but according to Samuel Pepys,** the diarist and Secretary to the Admiralty, the interest rate increased to as much as 20% and even 30 % per annum.*** The rate of interest merchants paid often exceeded 33% per annum, even though the legal rate was only 6% per annum.# Workmen and poor people bore the brunt of these extortionate rates of interest by having to pay 60%, 70% or even 80% per annum.## Accordin to Michael Godfrey, the author of a pamphlet entitled A Short Account of the Bank of England, two to three million pounds had been lost through the bankruptcies of goldsmiths and the disappearance of their clerks.###
* Alhambra Decree also known as the Edict of Expulsion.
** A. M. Andreadēs, History of the Bank of England, P.S. King & Son Ltd, London, 1935, 35. Pepys described these extortionate rates of interest as “a most horrid shame.”
***Ibid., 24. The author has also relied on Israel Disraeli’s “Usurers of the Seventeenth Century.” www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16350?msg=welcome_stranger
# Ibid., 24.
## Ibi., 47.
### Ibid., 24-25.
Stephen Goodson
History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind
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