application of ethics to economic transactions was rendered possible
by the existence of one universally recognised code of morality,
and the presence of one universally accepted moral teacher. 'In the
thirteenth century, the ecclesiastical organisation gave a unity to
the social structure throughout the whole of Western Europe; over the
area in which the Pope was recognised as the spiritual and the Emperor
as the temporal vicar of God, political and racial differences were
relatively unimportant. For economic purposes it is scarcely necessary
to distinguish different countries from one another in the thirteenth
century, for there were fewer barriers to social intercourse
within the limits of Christendom than there are to-day.... Similar
ecclesiastical canons, and similar laws prevailed over large areas,
where very different admixtures of civil and barbaric laws were in
vogue. Christendom, though broken into so many fragments politically,
was one organised society for all the purposes of economic life,
because there was such free intercommunication between its parts.'[2]
'There were three great threads,' we read later in the same book,
'which ran through the whole social system of Christendom. First of
all there was a common religious life, with the powerful weapons of
spiritual censure and excommunication which it placed in the hands of
the clergy, so that they were able to enforce the line of policy which
Rome approved. Then there was the great judicial system of canon
law, a common code with similar tribunals for the whole of Western
Christendom, dealing not merely with strictly ecclesiastical affairs,
but with many matters that we should regard as economic, such as
questions of commercial morality, and also with social welfare as
affected by the law of marriage and the disposition of property by
will....'[3] 'To the influence of Christianity as a moral doctrine,'
says Dr. Ingram, 'was added that of the Church as an organisation,
charged with the application of the doctrine to men's daily