By taking it into demesne control, instead of receiving a fixed nominal rent, the lord of the manor could take receipt of the real output of the land, which could be consumed, traded, or sold for silver at the going spot price. The consequence was that the richer the baron, the more land he had to exploit, and the greater his potential profits. The effect was to create a massively wealthy elite of oligarchs, now breaking free both of the middling ranks of the gentry at one end, and of the hard-pressed King (or public sector) at the other. In all of this, the option of demesne management was infeasible for the King, likely because it would have involved destabilising relations with the administrative class of “sheriffs” and other royal officials upon whom the King’s political stability depended. 6 Causes of the inflation Forget royal infighting, wars or the whiff of revolution, it is inflation that really sets the pulses of central bankers racing. And for good reason because closer inspection suggests that inflation may have been a significant catalyst to Magna Carta. Historians estimate that prices were rising sharply in the early 1200s. The prices of agricultural goods, including wheat and oxen, probably doubled in that period. 7 Evidence suggests that prices of linen, wax, lead and even palfreys – the Toyota Prius of medieval horses – were also rising rapidly. Wages were rising as well – and to a greater extent than could have just been the consequence of medieval real-wage resistance.
17  The coronation charter of Henry I issued in 1100 (which was also endorsed by Henry II at his own coronation in 1154) is a pertinent example because it was effectively the draft on which Magna Carta was later based, containing several of the clauses now regarded as the most significant. The original text was written in one continuous flow. Its division into clauses is a modern construct. 18  Moreover it came after a lacuna of sixty years during which the House of Plantagenet had issued no similar conciliatory charters and whose actions in the meantime had caused sufficient damage to the relationship between nobility and monarchy as to make an uprising inevitable. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  Despite the efforts of Coke and others, Charles I’s rejection of all enterprise to constrain his authority led to the English Civil War and to the king’s beheading in 1649. Meanwhile, Coke’s unstoppable Magna Carta redux had been set in motion. In contradiction to their behaviour at home, James and Charles had been busily granting royal charters promising the liberties of Englishmen to the American colonists. Coke himself had been involved in the drafting of the first charter of the Virginia Company in 1606, and similar English liberties were extended in the charters of Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Carolina over the next sixty years. Some have argued that references to Magna Carta, however irrelevant its provisions might by then have been, were used as a way of “drumming up” New World settlers.