How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act

Abstract

We study the emergence of urban self-governance in the late medieval period. We focus on England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, building a novel comprehensive dataset of 554 medieval towns. During the Commercial Revolution (twelfth to thirteenth centuries), many merchant towns obtained Farm Grants: the right of self-governed tax collection and law enforcement. Self-governance, in turn, was a stepping stone for parliamentary representation: Farm Grant towns were much more likely to be summoned directly to the medieval English Parliament than otherwise similar towns. We also show that self-governed towns strengthened the role of Parliament and shaped national institutions over the subsequent centuries. (JEL D02, D72, D73, K11, K34, N43, N93)

The Refugee’s Dilemma: Evidence from Jewish Migration out of Nazi Germany

“…Therefore, we report in Section 6 an important robustness check to assess how missing information on migration/deportation trajectories affects estimates. Our approach builds upon the entropy balancing method introduced by Hainmueller (2012), and used in the applied economic history literature to achieve balancedness across covariates between treatment and control groups (Satyanath et al, 2017;Voigtländer and Voth, 2020;Angelucci et al, 2021;Caprettini and Voth, 2021, among others). In a nutshell, we reweight observations of the F sample, using entropy weights, so that it matches the observable characteristics of individuals with unknown trajectories.…”

Culture, Institutions & the Long Divergence

“…The "high q, high λ" equilibrium characterized Western Europe until the 11th century, when the re-birth of commerce gave rise to independent cities and increased tensions between the religious and secular elite (Angelucci, Meraglia and Voigtländer 2020;Rubin 2011). The rebirth of commerce entailed that religious proscriptions (φ in our model), such as the ban on usury, were more economically harmful.…”

“…Meanwhile, weaker European rulers had greater incentive to negotiate with their economic (i.e., feudal) elites for revenue and military power, since they had little capacity to rule otherwise (Duby 1982). Throughout Europe, rulers also ceded power to urban burghers, who had relative freedom from imperial rule (Angelucci, Meraglia and Voigtländer 2020;Mann 1986;Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti 1994;Schulz 2020). More generally, this meant that Muslim rulers had less constraint on their power, which a large literature suggests is harmful for economic growth (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012;Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2005b;North and Weingast 1989;North, Wallis and Weingast 2009;van Zanden, Buringh and Bosker 2012).…”

“…Feudal institutions gave lords-secular lords as well as powerful bishops-great power over their local domains, and in return the lords provided military service and tax revenue to their sovereign (Duby 1982). Over the course of the late medieval and early modern periods, parliaments became the primary institution which bargained with European rulers (Angelucci, Meraglia and Voigtländer 2020;van Zanden, Buringh and Bosker 2012). Parliaments allowed the economic elite to gain representation at the political bargaining table, and they generally included three classes: the landed nobility, powerful churchmen, and commercial/urban elite.…”

Review of periodical literature for 2022: (ii) 1100–1500

“…Political structures and their economic impacts were a particularly popular topic. Angelucci, Meraglia and Voigtländer examine the development of self‐governing merchant towns in England using a dataset of 555 boroughs which existed before the Black Death. They demonstrate that a combination of involvement in trade and being in royal hands caused specific towns to seek ‘Farm Grants’ (conferring rights to self‐governance including in tax collection and law enforcement) from the crown.…”