The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (35 page)

Not all the Paris hostels were in the better
parts of town. Jacques
de Vitry was a
student there in the last years of the twelfth century, in a house with a school
upstairs and a brothel downstairs; which he seemed to see as trouble and not as an
asset. He remembered that ‘on one level, the whores fought among themselves and
with their pimps; and in the rest of the house, there were clerics shouting and
arguing’.
⁵¹

All this had legal pitfalls, like any
business. Consider Master Petrus de Arenciaco, who taught in Paris and leased an
apartment by the Seine from a rather wealthy lawyer. He then let out rooms to three
students, two brothers and one other. For whatever reason, the brothers were not happy;
in the autumn of 1336 they moved out with all their goods to lodge with a woman called
Johanna ‘la Pucelle’ – who with that nickname may just possibly have been
pure, but was certainly young and a woman. The master was left with his lease, and he
started to pay rent only for himself and the one student he had left, and naturally the
lawyer went to law; he seized the brothers’ goods to make them go on paying him.
The brothers said the problem was the master’s, and the rent was due only from the
men still living in the apartment and not them; and they won their case. Students came
and went, but the masters took the blame.
⁵²

There were also rivalries, trading blocs,
cartels, unfair trade practices and trade wars. Franciscans and Dominicans came to Paris
to teach and to learn, but they came late, in the 1210s; masters and students from
outside the religious orders were already settled and established. The friars had an
awkward relationship with the university from the start, because they were not allowed
to study law or the arts, the schools which swore an actual oath to the university
itself;
⁵³
competition for students, and for chairs in theology, only made things
worse. The friars were supported and subsidized by their orders, even though the
Franciscans insisted they had nothing, not even property in common, while the secular
masters had to piece together parishes and benefices, rents and student rolls to make a
living. They were, in two words, unfair competition.

When celebrations went wrong in Lent 1229,
and city guards arrested some students and casually killed some, the secular masters
called for ‘
cessatio
’, which means roughly a strike. They objected
to
the breach of academic privilege –
students were clerics and should never have been hauled off the streets – rather than
the death of students, and they walked out of Paris, some for Orleans down the road,
some off to Toulouse, some to Oxford and even Cambridge; the strike was the making of
Cambridge. The friars stayed put in Paris, took the chance to acquire some more chairs
of theology, and started a very pointed campaign against the multiple benefices on which
the absent masters depended. They persuaded the Bishop of Paris to rule that two
benefices disqualified a man from salvation, at least if one was worth more than fifteen
Parisian pounds, and then salted the wound by insisting on teaching the ruling in their
classrooms.

Worse, John of St Giles, a secular master,
took to teaching Dominican students and gave a great sermon on the beauty of voluntary
poverty, which was something the seculars reckoned was quite close to heresy; after all,
how can a man be charitable and virtuous if he has nothing to share or give away?
Halfway through the sermon, John stepped down from the pulpit and made a quick change;
he finished the sermon dressed in the Dominican habit. He was a heretic but he was also
now a traitor.
⁵⁴

The language of this holy rivalry was all
about money: about the right not to have property. But money and trade and dealing
defined even the basic institutions of the universities. Each hostel owner was a source
of dinner, but also of credit, and each hostel was run to make money. Suppose you had
come south to Paris from some great merchant town like Bruges; the hostel at the
University of Paris might seem familiar from the hostels at home where merchants stayed
and did business and stored their goods.

Foreigners lodged together in those
merchants’ hostels, far from home,
⁵⁵
and they also lodged goods and
money to establish their credit, got involved in dealing and borrowing, met and talked
and found things out and did business: the men who stayed in a hostel belonged to the
hostel. The men in a professor’s house were much the same; they were brotherhoods
with a purpose. Traders had to go to Bruges to do business. Likewise students from
Flanders or Frisia had to go to Paris because there was no university in all Flanders
until
Louvain was founded in the 1420s.
Those old traders the Frisians were still travelling – but now as students.

Money was not just the clutter and rush of
traders, foreigners, people with goods and money to spend, all coming and going, to
ports, to fairs, to markets, although a Paris student could see all that just by
crossing the Seine to buy an apple or a loaf of bread. Money was everyone’s
everyday calculation, which coins were worth what, how much silver in a coin; everyone
had to know how to work things out. True, great traders paid with ingots of silver,
solid bars of the kind which were used to buy land or provide a daughter with a dowry,
but even they were under pressure to pay some bills with the variable coins. In Cologne
a trader could be arrested if he didn’t change his ingots for coins. Flemish
traders sometimes melted down coins to make new ingots, and in England the local
business was done in coins but goods were sent abroad in the expectation of getting back
ingots.
⁵⁶
Since the Church kept forbidding usury, the way to make money out of
money was not to lend it out but to watch the money markets.

So money became a great issue for
theologians and philosophers, at the very heart of how to define a good civic life.
Money was the spiritual riddle of the age: how to define the worth of things, make a
profit on it and still avoid damnation.

William of Ockham was another Franciscan. He
read the newly rediscovered and fashionable Aristotle, and then he wrote of mathematics
as a language for talking about things, a tool you could use to think hard about
subjects even where nothing at all was being measured – a very useful figment of the
imagination. In Ockham’s account, science didn’t just have to be about
describing things and explaining them; it could be about measuring and calculating.
What’s more, the things you can count and calculate could be quite abstract; you
didn’t trip over them in the world of real objects. Maths was about the kind of
statement Euclid made when he said that even if two parallel lines were extended to
infinity, they would never meet; nobody expected to draw those lines, or find them in
the real world, and yet the statement was useful in the real world. Thanks to equations,
it was now reasonable to make comparisons between unlike things and
concentrate on just one quality: you could compare the
brownness of a brown horse with the brownness of a brown cow.
⁵⁷

In Aristotle’s thinking, money was the
way you evened out the deal when you were bartering goods and services; imagine a
shoemaker doing business with a housebuilder, and it’s easy to see how a bit of
cash sorts out the differences between the goods each man is offering. But money had
become more than this useful expedient. According to Thomas Aquinas it was a way of
expressing value: the value of all the work and materials that go into building a house
compared with the time and work you need to make a pair of shoes. Such trading was
tolerable, more or less, but dangerous, because it led to the possibility of profit.
Greed was sin, and profit was excusable only if it was not the whole point of a deal.
Prices had to be calculated with a moral equation: a ‘just price’. Prices
might change when things were plentiful or things were scarce, but out there was a fine,
high notion: a ‘true’ economic value.
⁵⁸

Everything was in motion now. Money meant
trade, and trade seemed to mean the end of the ‘perfect city’ that Aristotle
imagined, strong and self-sufficient. Money was the engine of the new ways and it
corrupted things: strangers came with different customs; there were never enough strong
soldiers because trading requires no muscle in itself; business was thought to weaken
the body and the heart. The unsettling of the world was very uncomfortable, so naturally
it was generally agreed that Aristotle had the right idea about trade and merchants:
doing things just for the sake of money was wrong. And yet profit, as the
thirteenth-century Pietro di Giovanni Olivi learned at Paris, still happens. He wrote of
‘various chances to buy and sell things with advantage; and this comes from
God’s Providence, just like all man’s other good things’. It could be
a gift of God, but ‘only if it does not go beyond the proper amount’.
⁵⁹

A man who sells something for a profit,
without carving or painting it like a craftsman, without making some material changes,
is not within God’s law; the writer known as Fake Chrysostom said anyone who
bought goods and sold them on for a profit, unaltered, was ‘the merchant who was
thrown out of the temple’.
⁶⁰
The theologian Henry of Ghent was
especially bothered by the man who bought at
a low price and sold for a profit at once, because an object
can’t change its value instantly; he implies that everything has a true value and
a just price, something that should not be changed artificially.

All dealers constantly face the moral test
of being as just as possible. He added: ‘Few succeed.’

There was also the question of whether an
object gains value just because it is shipped from one place to another, whether food
can be cheaper or dearer depending on the weather and the harvest. Value was a
complicated equation, and the merchant’s job was to work out the value and set the
price; that, too, was a service, and it was worth paying for.

Being modern, we want someone to say that
the market sets the price, the comfort of something as impersonal as the market’s
‘invisible hand’, but price and value depended, in the medieval mind, on the
immediate moral decisions of many individuals: their will to be just and fair, the
decision not to chase always and only after money. It was so much a matter of theology,
and not economics, that not much thought was given to checking and regulating the
market. When Henry of Ghent put a value on the merchant’s useful work in
considering different places and different seasons when setting a price, he didn’t
actually deal with the possibility that the merchant might get things wrong or be
speculating to make money, or organizing a comfortable monopoly.
⁶¹

There is no economics here, not as we know
it, but there are fierce discussions and disputes and doubts about the economic world,
and some convenient conclusions. From now on, profit is not always usury. Private
property is fine. Theologians could agree that there was no private property before the
fall of man and the end of the garden of Eden; but now that man was rotten with original
sin, private property was the only way to stop the bullies and the strongarms taking
over absolutely everything that in an ideal world would be held in common. This flatters
those lucky or forceful enough to have property already; at least, it says, they might
be much, much worse.

Nicholas Oresme went to Avignon, where he
preached fiercely in front of Pope Urban V, so fiercely that some called him a heretic.
‘Everything the prophets in the
Bible said about Jewish priests, he turned against the priests of his time; he called
them dogs without the strength to bark, shameless, not knowing how much is enough, and
shepherds who cared for their own interests rather than their flocks.’
⁶²
At
the heart of his anger was money: the fact that the Church was selling pardons and
positions, making money the reason for doing things and also for claiming that God did
things in return for the money, like forgive sin. Men who should be holy were burning up
with a passion for the grand and luxurious and rich; he talked furiously about the
merchants selling doves in the temple, the men that Jesus expelled.
⁶³
He was, after all,
the author of a
Traité des monnaies
: an
Essay on Money
.

He was a bishop, and used his fine training
in the abstract questions and answers of the scholastic method to write a work on the
mathematics of the sphere, the basics of Euclid and Aristotle’s account of the
weather, the sky and how things are born and how they die. He did serious business with
texts: for the king’s benefit he turned Latin into French. He also wrote ideas
that were his own. He examined the movements of the heavens and whether they could be
measured; and with that last investigation, he started what was almost a campaign
against astrology. He came to believe, through quite original mathematics, that the
heavens turn in a way that can’t be reduced to charts and exact oppositions and
conjunctions; all those things are ratios and the more you try to relate all the pairs
of numbers you can imagine, and the ratios between them, the more you end up with
numbers that can’t be reduced to ratios at all – irrational numbers. He had the
young king Charles V as a friend, and he wanted to shuffle him out of the influence of
the court astrologers, using mathematics with a clever twist here, a downright radical
speculation there.

He was properly academic, properly
intellectual. He was also the man who managed to block the spoiling of French money, the
process of clipping and muddling the metals in coins. Money was an issue for him – and
not just money when it went wrong, when the official rates differed from the rates in
the marketplace, when silver was cut with copper to make more coins – but money as a
mathematical idea and its meaning in the world. In Oresme’s view, the world
was unstable, always changing – because the
amounts of food, drink, metals, pots, pans and necessities were always changing – and
money was the essential way to test and calculate real value.