Sir Robert Clayton and the Origins of English Deposit Banking 1658-1685

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Cambridge University Press, Aug 22, 2002 - Business & Economics - 272 pages
Based upon the most extensive early banking archive known to survive, this book is the first major study of Stuart banking since R. D. Richards's The Early History of Banking in England (1928). It traces the origins and growth of banking from the late sixteenth century to the 1720s through two generations of a scriveners' bank established in 1638 by Robert Abbott, and perpetuated by his nephew, Robert Clayton, and John Morris. With deposits from landowners' rents and stock sales these bankers practised as moneylenders and money-brokers for another sector of the gentry needing capital to offset the effects of the Great Rebellion and an agricultural depression. After 1660 Clayton and Morris integrated mortgage security into banking practice. This study examines the elaborate stages of land assessment and legal change which enabled bankers to offer large-scale, long-term securities to their clients, a pattern followed later by other banks such as Childs, Hoares, Martins and Coutts.

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Contents

English banking in historical perspective
16
The master scrivener and his apprentices 161058
40
The scriveners bank
67
The records of early banking
95
Law practice and profits of the early banking mortgage
126
The new land assessment from the terrier to the estate particular
158
The management of mortgaged estates
181
The aftermath of Restoration banking
207
Growth of clients deposit
228
Growth of the bank
229
Goldsmithbankers 16701700
233
Clayton MSS in public collections
243
Index
252
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Page 5 - Sunderland to carry her thither on a solemn day, that she might see the pomp and ceremony of this Prince of Citizens, there never having been any, who, for the stateliness of his palace, prodigious feasting, and magnificence, exceeded him.
Page 13 - Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century,
Page 2 - Knt. in the year MDCLXXX. Lord Mayor, and at his death Alderman and Father of the City of London, and near XXX years was one of its Representatives in Parliament. By the justest methods and skill in business he acquired an ample fortune, which he applied to the noblest purposes, and more than once ventured It all for his country. He fixed the seat of his family at Marden, where he hath left a remarkable instance of the politeness of his genius, and how far Nature may be improved by Art.

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