The ‘rise of a money economy’ is one of the residuary hypotheses of economic history: a deus ex machina to be called upon when no other explanation is available. The subject of economic history is sufficiently new to contain problems which economic historians have not yet had time to resolve, and problems which have not yet been resolved lend themselves only too easily to generalized assumptions. These stop-gap generalities have not so far been described or catalogued. But a critical reader would probably recognize them without the aid of a cautionary table. For most of them are little more than invocations of sociological theories underlying the Victorian idea of progress.

One such invocation is the so-called ‘rise of the middle classes’. Eileen Power and others have already pointed out how frequently the middle-class formula has been used to bridge gaps in historical knowledge. The recipe has been to credit the rising middle classes with almost every revolutionary event of European culture to which a more specific cause has not yet been assigned. If towns grew in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this was due to the rise of the middle classes; if lay culture and religious dissent flourished in the late twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries, this was also due to the rise of the middle classes. So, if we are to believe some writers, was the consolidation of national monarchies in England and France in the later Middle Ages, the dissolution of feudal power in the fifteenth century, the Reformation, the Tudor despotism, the Elizabethan renaissance, the scientific development of the seventeenth century, the Puritan revolution, the economic liberalism and the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century.