How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act
- (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