How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act
Name
angelucci-et-al-2022-how-merchant-towns-shaped-parliaments-from-the-norman-conquest-of-england-to-the-great-reform-act.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.07 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e84c8a29d6237dba08b6d6293622d01f
Author(s)
Angelucci, Charles
Meraglia, Simone
Voigtländer, Nico
Date Issued
October 2022
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
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.
Version
Final published version
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. (JEL D02, D72, D73, K11, K34, N43, N93).
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1257/aer.20200885
