Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

The fifteenth century is, in fact, considered the heyday of medieval festive life, with its floats and dragons, maypoles and church ales, its Abbots of Unreason and Lords of Misrule.1 Over the next centuries, all this was to be destroyed. In England, the festive life was systematically attacked by Puritan reformers, then eventually by reformers everywhere, Catholic and Protestant alike. At the same time its economic basis in popular prosperity dissolved. Why this happened has been a matter of intense historical debate for centuries. This much we know: it began with a massive inflation. Between 1500 and 1650, for instance, prices in England increased 500 percent, but wages rose much more slowly, so that in five generations, real wages fell to perhaps 40 percent of what they had been.