Credit Civil litigation, economy and credit Credit existed alongside money, and both were measured in shillings and pounds. Money was material, and had intrinsic market value, whereas credit was measured on monetary systems of value, but was flexible, liquid and its value was established in networks of interpersonal trust, not a permanent metal. There was a period of economic expansion from the 1540s, as food prices more than trebled, industrial prices doubled and the amount of goods being consumed on the market roughly doubled. Demand for money soared, whilst coin supply hardly expanded. Coins were problematic, Henry VIII devalued the amount of silver in his coins in the 1540s, resulting in tradesmen valuing coinage at the market rate of its silver content, inflating prices. Elizabethan reform restored the value of currency leading to coin clipping. There was great variability in coin quality, and tradesmen hoarded good quality coins for important transactions, whilst impure coins were used for day-to- day transactions. The dual issue of clipping and hoarding is represented in William Stout's remark that people in London thought he was using a foreign coinage. Credit networks expanded to allow for the greater rate of transactions within an expanding economy. Muldrew estimates that money formed less than 10% of exchanges, and probate inventories from the late sixteenth century, even amongst richer persons, contain very little cash. Credit networks expanded in complexity at times of economic expansion, and the more complex such networks became, the greater the need to secure payments from various clients through a formal means, given the lack of ready cash, though debts could be reckoned against one another, it was more difficult to completely reconcile a debtor creditor relationship. Most contracts were based on trust, the sealed bonds being reserved primarily for tradesmen and merchants. K. Thomas has shown that numeracy was even less widespread than was literacy, it had been doubted that even Nehemiah Wallington kept account books despite earning three hundred pounds per annum. Like coinage, credit needed something to ground and secure its value, and given that there was no precious metal it was directly attached to, and given the complexity and uncertainty of credit relations, formal procedures of some kind were necessary to secure the network of trust which underpinned such a medium of exchange. Between 1560 and 1640, cases of debt increased from 19% to 80% at the King's Bench and from 67% to 80% at the Common Pleas. This was linked to expansion, not times of dearth. During the plague and bad harvests of the 1590s, debt litigation in local courts fell by more than half, prices of foodstuffs rose, but there was a vastly reduced rate of inflation for industrial goods. We should be wary of equating civil litigation and credit networks too simplistically. 'Civil litigation' as a means of securing credit networks was multi- layered. Muldrew's study of Kings Lynn from 1683 to 1686 shows that only 16% of cases went beyond complaint, and that only 4% came to judgement.