American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act
American Economic Review
vol. 112,
no. 10, October 2022
(pp. 3441–87)
(Complimentary)
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.Citation
Angelucci, Charles, Simone Meraglia, and Nico Voigtländer. 2022. "How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act." American Economic Review, 112 (10): 3441–87. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20200885Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D02 Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- D73 Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
- K11 Property Law
- K34 Tax Law
- N43 Economic History: Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation: Europe: Pre-1913
- N93 Regional and Urban History: Europe: Pre-1913