if credit on the whole tended to impoverish and enslave the inhabitants of the country, cash had the opposite effect. It enabled both lords and peasants to shop for a greater variety of market goods and spurred them to increase their marketable production in order to procure more cash: further, it loosened all inherited personal attachments to a master, a community and a routine.... The agrarian ideal of security based on permanent mutual obligations was slowly bending towards the commercial quest for opportunity based on temporary contractual agreements.13Furthermore, "pressed by necessity, and much more aware of economic realities and relative values than their predecessors [the lords of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries] took advantage of the increase in productivity and the more thorough circulation of money in the countryside" (Duby 1976:258). Money had begun to dissolve the masonry of feudalism.
This dissolution was more apparent after the Black Plague than it had ever been before: "The initial result of the series of plagues in the second half of the fourteenth century was a dramatic increase in the per capita wealth of the survivors; money, gold and silver plate, and durable goods of all sorts remained to be divided among perhaps one third fewer people than before the plague" (Miskimin 1969:87). This increase in wealth led to "the enhanced demand for luxury products, partially met by an upgrading of diet but more dramatically visible in changes of taste favoring the conspicuous consumption of expensive items of personal adornment" (Miskimin 1969:135). Fewer people with more wealth and the resultant desire for conspicuous consumption constitute only one, if the most ostentatious, example of money's gradual triumph, however. In addition, and just as depressing to the old spirit of personal loyalty, was, for example, the very cheap renting of land that the peasantry enjoyed when the lesser nobility, who were often small landlords, were forced to break up their holdings because of scarce labor and exorbitant wages (Duby 1976:306-11; Kershaw 1976:111 and 122). These lesser nobility--who, according to Thorlac Turville-Petre (1977:40-47), were the major patrons of the Alliterative Revival--were frequent casualties of the economic crisis because "each time a landlord was driven to rent out more land, he thereby further undermined his economic position by making rents lower, grain cheaper, and labor more expensive.... [Furthermore] each {12/13} new disaster suffered by the landlords enhanced the bargaining position of the peasants, so that attempts to resuscitate obsolete feudal burdens were foredoomed to failure" (Miskimin 1969:44-45). Finally, "legislation promulgated in many countries and designed to reduce the `excessive' demands of wage earners tended, in fact, to create a kind of black market for labor, in which, since the legal wage rate was below the economic wage rate, the landlord was compelled to violate the law if he hoped to prevent labor from seeking alternative employment" (Miskimin 1969:30). Before such pressures, feudalism and what might be called chivalric aspiration had to sink exhausted and obsolescent.
A further example from a different sphere--though intimately connected with money, namely credit--will also be instructive. Edward III fought his French wars largely on borrowed money. Wool had become more valuable as collateral than as cloth. Hence, for example, "from the parliament of February 1338 [Edward] received some kind of authorization for preemption of half the wool in the kingdom (estimated at 100,000 sacks) . . . and on the security of this new grant he arranged with the Bardi and the Peruzzi for substantial loans" (McKisack 1959:157). But these were the very Italian banking houses that, because of his later failure to honor his many debts, Edward broke, the Peruzzi in 1343 and the Bardi in 1346 (Miskimin 1969:151) Wars fought on loans subsequently defaulted on were only one sign of the power, positive and negative, of money and credit. When to this sign are added others such as dry exchange and contra-cambium--gimmicks that were used to disguise usury and thus avoid ecclesiastical censure (Bernard 1972:323-27 and de Roover 1967: 33)--it becomes possible, even in such a bare sketch as the present one, to appreciate how pervasive money had become in the mid-fourteenth century--and how blatant its abuses (Duby 1976:259).
In such an environment Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written. It was an environment in which men were increasingly aware of the exclusive triumph of a money economy. Hence, for example, Chaucer's and Langland's concerns and anxieties about money: the Wife of Bath's "`Winne whoso may, for al is for to selle'." (III D 414); Will's outburst against false coiners and counterfeiters (A. 10. 19); not to mention the figure elsewhere in Piers the Plowman of Lady Meed. Not only poets but also theologians and philosophers, such as Fishacre or d'Ailly (Courtenay 1971:94-119), and social theorists, such as Nicholas Oresme in his De Moneta and in his translation of the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica, reflect this triumph of what is ultimately symbolic displacement--so many nobles for so much sex (cf. The Miller's {13/14} Tale I A 3256), so many pennies for so much bread, so many pounds for the conquest of France.
Perhaps the most telling indication of the changes that money had wrought is a development in the theology and the iconography of the seven deadly sins, a development crucial to understanding Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. According to Lester K. Little (1978:36), in the wake of money's takeover of human affairs, avarice became as important as pride in considerations of the root and cause of sin and evil:
Until the end of the tenth century, pride was unreservedly dominant as the most important vice; writers who dealt with avarice tended to reduce it to a subcategory of pride. But in the eleventh century, Peter Damian heralded a significant change when stating unequivocally: "Avarice is the root of all evil." . . . Over two decades later he characterized the leading problem in contemporary monastic life as the love of money.... Pride in the meantime did not surrender its place of preeminence but was henceforth constrained to share that place with avarice.With Gawain's curse on his couetyse, or `avarice' (2374), the poem adds its own to the numerous voices, prior to it and contemporary with it, that were crying out against this sin which money especially inspires.14 Although its tone is not moralistic and although its concern is not one of social reform, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is enough a part of its time and place to see in the growth of commerce and of a money economy the need for a warning against couetyse. The poem differs from other texts--venality satires, for example (Yunck 1963:1-13)--being greater than they are, in this particular: if it knows that a man, even the very best of men, will succumb to avarice, it also affirms that he can rise again--through confession, penitence, and, above all, humility. {14}