Usury and the politics of interest in later sixteenth-century England

In the Middle Ages, interesse referred to a legitimate stake to something, such as an enforceable title to property. Though early humanists inflected the term with connotations in classical Latin, to differ, be present, or make a difference, it still tended to denote a recognised privilege. From the turn of the sixteenth century, however, as the term came to be employed as a tendentious legal justification for a predetermined charge to borrow money, it underwent a radical semantic transformation. This paper explores how Elizabethan politiques adopted the term, in the context of a wide-ranging controversy surrounding the explosion of usurious activity, to convey the antagonism between the subjective motivations of individuals and the objective good of the state. The significance of this new invocation, it argues, lay in the possibility that it raised for the disjuncture between the pursuit of private advantage and the common good to be closed without the need for moral transformation. If it was no longer possible for secular law to prohibit usury, then how could this situation nevertheless be resolved, by regulating private interests in a way that served the public?

Jon Cooper is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford University, USA.