Abstract
The fact that many activities considered usurious were legal, and indeed had been legal in some form in virtually all historical civilizations, caused significant problems for the anti-usury campaigners. It was frequently said that usury had been made legal so that it might be tightly restricted, and that usury law was a way of mollifying human rapacity, which would otherwise lead to predatory lending outside the law. As William Perkins wrote in 1606:
[I]n this our land there is the practise of Vsurie, a sinne that cannot, nor euer shall be rooted out vtterly. For this cause, the States of this kingdome, haue out of their wisdome, prouided a Law for the toleration thereof after a sort, and that vpon speciall cause. For if the Magistrate should haue enacted a Law vtterly to abolish it, it would before this (in likelihood) haue growne to great extremitie. The same was the practise of the Apostles in their times, who yeelded to beare with the vse of Circumcision for a time, when they could not otherwise vtterly cut it off.1
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Notes
See Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker (ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 26–53.
Robert Wilson, Three Ladies of London in Lloyd Kermode (ed.), Three Usury Plays (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009).
Milton’s poetry is quoted from Merritt Hughes (ed.), John Milton: Complete Poetry and Major Prose (New York: Prentice Hall, 1957).
Memorandum prepared for the royal commission on the exchanges (1564), cit. Eileen Power and R.H. Tawney (eds.), Tudor Economic Documents (London: Longmans, 1924), 3:353.
David W. Jones, Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of the Differences that Separated the Protestant Reformers (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2004), 4.
See Charles H. George, “English Calvinist Opinion on Usury, 1600–1640,” Journal of the History of Ideas 18.4 (Oct. 1957): 455–74.
Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (U of Chicago P, 1969), 73.
C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford UP, 1962).
Cit. C.H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David 3 vols. (Hendrickson Publishers, 1988), Retrieved from http://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/treasury-of-david/psalms-15–1.html, September 2009.
See Mark Valeri, “Religious Discipline and the Market: Puritans and the Issue of Usury,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54.4 (1997): 747–68.
See Newhauser, Richard, The Early History of Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 16.
Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, R.H. Tawney (ed.) (New York: Kelley, 1963), 189–90.
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© 2010 David Hawkes
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Hawkes, D. (2010). The Theological Critique. In: The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107663_4
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