• Charts the relative contribution made to the development of the late medieval English economy by enterprise, money and credit
  
• Covers the entire kingdom, while concentrating on the ten counties which recorded the most credit in each period
• Highlights key differences in regional enterprise which arose from differences in the natural assets of a region, and its ease of access to overseas trade
  

Pamela Nightingale read history at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she stayed to do research for a Ph.D. which she was awarded in 1963. Her first three books were on the history of British India and Chinese Central Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, until she changed her field to write a book on the trade and politics of medieval London. Her research led her to investigate and then to calendar the huge collection of certificates of debt in the National Archives on which this present book is based.  Her publications, two Senior Research Fellowships held at the Ashmolean Museum, and regular participation in an Oxford research seminar on medieval economic and social history led to her election in 1999 as a member of Oxford University's Faculty of History, and in 2010 she was awarded an Oxford D.Litt. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.