Borrowing from Church funds in rural Sweden, ca. 1770 to ca. 1900

Abstract This paper analyses one of the early and probably underestimated institutional lenders in northern Europe, the Church, using Sweden as a case study. Lending escalated from the 1770s onwards, making the church the dominant institutional lender in the mid-18th century. As other institutional lenders became stronger, lending declined. The success of church funds was a result of their strong local presence, being controlled by parishioners and overwhelmingly used by them, certainly by freehold farmers and local officials, and in the second half of the nineteenth century also by the landless. Even townspeople can be found among the borrowers. However, in previous studies of borrowing based on probate inventories, loans from the church have been scarce, leading to the conclusion that the church played a minor role as a lender. By combining probate inventories and church accounts, we can show that the church was an important lender in certain areas, but that most loans were medium-term and taken early in the life cycle, and therefore rarely visible in probate inventories, which were predominantly made after middle-aged or old people.