Reckoning and Economic Life in Late Medieval England

Author：Tom Johnson

Abstract:

This article explores the practice of ‘reckoning’, a means of reciprocal accounting that becomes prominent in late-medieval England. Despite its critical importance to everyday exchange in this period, the practice has not received much attention from historians. The article argues that reckoning should be understood as a kind of economic infrastructure, one that performed some of the same functions as formal markets; and that as a concept, it was critical to the way that contemporaries delineated different forms of economic exchange.

I proceed by tracing the emergence of reckoning from a convergence of institutional accounting, increasing technical literacy, and the proliferation of written accounts from the thirteenth century onwards. I go on to argue that as a tool of economic exchange, reckoning was particularly well-suited to the straitened economic conditions of the fifteenth century, in particular the shortage of coin, the retrenchment of formal markets, and the pervasive use of credit. I then examine three case studies in which reckoning went ‘wrong’, in order to explore the ideals of exchange relations on which it drew. In conclusion, I suggest that reckoning can help us to frame some of the broader transformations in economic culture in post-plague England.

Past & Present, Volume 272, Issue 1, August 2026, Pages 52–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaf010

Published: 23 April 2025

Open access and free to download