This book retraces the nature and role of credit in the pre-industrial European countryside. As part of an ongoing examination of credit and its provision in European past societies, the nine papers collected in this volume offer further insight into the ways in which credit was provided and managed, as well as the opportunities which credit may or may not have presented in effecting economic and social change between c. 1200 and c. 1850. In these respects, the papers in this volume add to a developing investigation of the history of credit and of indebtedness in northern Europe, which also coincides with a continued interest in the structures of credit evident in studies of southern European societies. The present volume also, for a broad North Sea region, develops a concentration upon the economic and social history of credit from the late medieval period to the early nineteenth century. The themes here are deliberately focused on the nature of credit, its form and structure, as well as upon the economic and social impact of credit and the changing availability of the same.