Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 62

There is one other incident in the reign of Charles II which must be mentioned, for it introduces us to a more modern element in law and society. Merchants and tradesmen who had the means frequently made loans as a subsidiary to their normal business. The scriveners (professional writers of “court-hand” who engrossed legal documents) were particularly associated with this business in the reign of Elizabeth, but after the Civil War and under the Restoration it was the goldsmiths who became most prominent. Moreover, these goldsmiths invented a few variations which really turned the old casual money-lending into professional banking. They accepted deposits from customers, at first merely for storage in their vaults, but soon in the more modern sense of deposits against which they issued notes.⁶ Already in Charles II’s reign, such deposits could be drawn upon by the customer’s cheque. The goldsmiths became financiers, discounted bills, and also purchased tallies (receipts for money lent to the Exchequer). These tallies were sometimes sold direct to the goldsmiths by the Exchequer,¹ thus serving as the machinery whereby the government raised short-term loans, and in 1672 the Government found itself unable to meet them when they became due. This crisis was called the “Stop of the Exchequer” and had serious results for the goldsmiths and their depositors. Recent research suggests that the King’s motives may have been less fraudulent than the Whig historians asserted, and that the resulting ruin has been grossly exaggerated.² Here we are concerned only with the more general significance of the rise of banking and public finance with the need for new legal principles to govern them, and with the great Bankers’ Case³ growing out the stop of the exchequer which settled the constitutional question of the right to bring a petition of right.