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When usury, the practice of lending money and charging the borrower interest, was abolished in England in the 15^th century, taxes were moderate and there was no state debt.  With tolerable taxes, no state debt and no interest to pay, England enjoyed a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity. 

The above description of 15^th century England is according to a 2014 book titled ‘A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind’ by Stephen Mitford Goodson. A book which argues against the central banking system scam.

Goodson, who died in 2018, was a director of the South African Reserve Bank between 2003 and 2012.  He was the leader of South Africa’s Abolition of Income Tax and Usury Party and an active commentator on the problems of the central banking system.

Below we have reproduced text from Goodson’s book that covers what he calls England’s “Glorious Middle Ages” and its demise. Goodson’s brief description of this period in English history seems to encapsulate the extent to which usury impacts ordinary people’s lives and, in some respects, feels relevant today.

Note from RW:  I have only read a few pages of Goodson’s book and from my limited view of Chapter II, in particular, I don’t agree with the view he takes which is to narrowly focus on the role of what he calls “Jews.” It is not the mention of specific names, which he did elsewhere in the book, it’s the use of the general collective term “the Jews” that’s concerning.  Additionally, he omitted to mention the far bigger role others such as the Vatican and the Venetian Nobles have played.  That Goodson focuses on the role of “the Jews” is perhaps not surprising considering he denied the Holocaust occurred and tended to view Adolf Hitler in a favourable light.

Regardless of Goodson’s personal views, a narrow focus and referring to people simply as the collective term “Jews” may encourage some small-minded people to use his book as an excuse to disseminate anti-Jewish rhetoric and cast blame on an entire nation or religious group for the bad behaviour of a few.  This is the very definition of racism and should not be tolerated.

To help keep things in perspective please see some of our previous articles HERE, HERE and HERE. It is also well worth researching topics such as the Radhanites or Radanites, who some claim are “fake Jews” that rebranded themselves as “Ashkenazi Jews.”

If one can read Goodson’s book without being influenced by any author bias and one can bear in mind that his viewpoint is a piece of a larger puzzle, it looks an interesting read.

As Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, a Zulu prince and Member of the South African Parliament, wrote in the foreword:

This book is bound to be controversial and engender strong reactions, and I do not endorse all of the viewpoints expressed therein.

Goodson has the credentials and track record to make a credible presentation of a subject matter which he has researched for decades and which he has lived personally as a non-executive Director of the South African Reserve Bank.

It may shock some to realise that central banks throughout the world, including our own South African Reserve Bank, do not serve our own best interests and are in fact in league with private banks. This not only undermines our sovereignty,  but deprives us of the means of having publicly-issued debt-free money which belongs to the people as its sovereign debt, and interest-free means of exchange.

A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind, Stephen Mitford Goodson, 2014

The following is an excerpt from ‘A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind’, Chapter II titled ‘The Hidden Origins of the Bank of England’.

The Glorious Middle Ages

With the banishment of the moneylenders and the abolition of usury,^[16] taxes were moderate and there was no state debt, as the interest-free tally stick^[17]  was used for government expenditures.  This ancient instrument of finance known to the  Saracens and possibly also to the Chinese is derived from the Latin word Tallia meaning a stick.  A  tally stick was made out of hazel, willow or boxwood because these woods split easily. They were usually eight inches in length  (20.3cm)  (from forefinger to thumb) and half an inch (1.3cm) wide, although they could be up to eight feet  (2.44m)  long.  The denominations were indicated by different sized cuts in the wood. £1,000 were marked by cutting out the thickness of the palm of a  hand,  £100 by the breadth of the little finger, £1 that of a swelling barleycorn, shillings somewhat less and pence were marked by incisions. The payee was recorded on the flat sides. When all the details had been recorded on the tally it was split nearly to the bottom, so that one part retained a stump or handle on which a hole would be bored. This was known as the counter tally or counterfoil and was held on a rod at the  Exchequer.  The flat strip (without the stump) was given to the payee. As no two pieces of wood are identical, it was impossible to forge a tally stick.

Tally sticks were first introduced during the reign of King Henry II (1100-35) and would remain in circulation until 1783.^[18] It was, however, during the period 1290-1485 that tallies would reach their apogee and constitute the principal means of state finance.  Tallies were used not only to pay state salaries, but to finance major items of infrastructure such as construction of the wall of the city of London, public buildings and ports. The exact amount of tallies in circulation is not known, but as late as 1694 £17 million worth were still in existence.  This was a prodigious sum as the  King’s annual budget rarely exceeded £2.5 million and a labourer earned a penny a day.

With tolerable taxes,^[19]  no state debt and no interest to pay, England enjoyed a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity.  The average labourer worked only 14 weeks and enjoyed 160 to 180 holidays. According to Lord William  Leverhulme,^[20]  a writer of that time, “The men of the 15th century were very well paid”, in fact so well paid that the purchasing power of their wages and their standard of living would only be exceeded in the late 19th century.  A labourer could provide for all the necessities his family required.  They were well clothed in good woollen cloth and had plenty of meat and bread.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Anglo-German philosopher, confirms these living conditions in his The Foundations of the XIXth Century.

“In  the  thirteenth  century,  when  the  Teutonic  races  began  to  build their new world, the agriculturalist over nearly the whole of Europe was  a  freer  man,  with  a  more  assured  existence,  than  he  is  today; copyhold^[21] was the rule, so that England, for example – today a seat of landlordism – was even in the fifteenth century almost entirely in the hands of thousands of farmers, who were not only legal owners of  their  land,  but  possessed  in  addition  far-reaching  free  rights  to common pastures and woodlands.”^[22]

During their spare hours many craftsmen volunteered their skills in building some of England’s magnificent cathedrals, which reinforces one of the basic tenets of Western civilisation that without leisure time, the fostering of culture is not possible.  George Macauley Trevelyan, the English social historian, describes these accomplishments as follows:

“The continuous but ever-moving tradition of ecclesiastical architecture still proceeded on its majestic way, filling England with towering forests of masonry of which the beauty and grandeur have never been rivalled either by the Ancients or the  Moderns … In the newer churches the light no longer crept but flooded in, through the stained glass, of which the secret is today even more completely lost
than the magic of the architecture.”^[23]

Although King Henry VIII (1509-1547) relaxed the laws regarding usury in 1509, they were subsequently repealed by his son King Edward VI (1547-53) by an Act of 1552 whose preamble stated that “usury is by word of God, utterly prohibited, as a vice most odious and detestable …”

End of a Golden Era

During the 17th century this golden era came to a tragic end. Large numbers of Jews, who had been expelled from Spain in 1492 by Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon^[24] on account of their persistent involvement in usury and unethical business practices, had settled in Holland.  Although the Dutch were at that time an important maritime power, the Jewish usurers based in Amsterdam desired to return to England, where their prospects for expanding the operations of their moneylending empire were far more promising.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603)  small numbers of Marranos-Spanish  Jews,  who had converted to a sham form of Christianity, settled in London. [Note from RW: Goodson didn’t say, but if they converted to Christianity, sham or not, then they did not practise Judaism. Or if they did, that too was a sham, and so the unqualified use of the term “Jews” is the author’s choice rather than fact].

Many of them practised as goldsmiths, accepting deposits of gold for safekeeping,  and then issuing ten times the amount of gold received as gold receipts, that is loans with interest. These receipts, a forerunner of the fraudulent fractional reserve system of banking, were initially lent to the Crown or Treasury at 8% per annum, but according to Samuel Pepys,^[25] the diarist and Secretary to the Admiralty, the interest rate increased to as much as 20% and even 30% per annum.^[26]  The rate of interest merchants paid often exceeded 33% per annum, even though the legal rate was only 6% per annum.^[27]  Workmen and poor people bore the brunt of these extortionate rates of interest by having to pay 60%, 70% or even 80% per annum.^[28]  According to Michael  Godfrey,  the author of a pamphlet entitled  A  Short Account of the  Bank of England, two to three million pounds had been lost through the bankruptcies of goldsmiths and the disappearance of their clerks.

References:

• ^[19] G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History, A Survey of Six Centuries Chaucer to Queen Victoria, Longmans Green and Co., London, 1948 writes that England was “a land whose people would not endure taxation” 63 and that “an obstinate refusal to pay taxes was a characteristic of the English at this period,” 107.
• ^[20] R.K. Hoskins, War Cycles – Peace Cycles, The Virginian Publishing Company, Lynchburg, Virginia, 1985, 54.
• ^[21] Copyhold was a form of manorial land rights which evolved from the system of serfdom.
• ^[22] H.S. Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, The Bodley Head, London, 1912, Vol. II, 354-355.
• ^[23] G.M. Trevelyan, op.cit., 51.
• ^[24] Alhambra Decree also known as the Edict of Expulsion.
• ^[25] A. M. Andreadēs, History of the Bank of England, P.S. King & Son Ltd, London, 1935, 35. Pepys described these extortionate rates of interest as “a most horrid shame.”
• ^[26] Ibid., 24. The author has also relied on Israel Disraeli’s “Usurers of the Seventeenth Century.” http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16350?msg=welcome_stranger
• ^[27] Ibid., 24.