The purpose of this project is to recover a missing link in the early history of English banking,-- the legal background to the rapid dominance of England in European banking. As such, it fills a gap that the strictly economic evidence in banking and archiving does not supply. Bankers during that time were familiar with that law and often sought to refine that nexus which for historians does not reflect itself in printed legal materials. However, there is in an unpublished archive a body of law pertaining to early banking in England. The project will retrieve and analyze that forgotten legal tradition through an on site inspection of this unexplored archive. The fundamental research questions to be addressed concern the degree of regulation banking faced in its early evolution. Were there a range of legal regulations relating to negotiable instruments, reserves, registration of banking conveyances, and deposits that are unknown to historians today but existed at the time? This research is important because it will shed important new light on the evolution and regulation of financial institutions.
