Business confidence is a measure of optimism or pessimism that managers feel about the commercial prospects for their organizations. This paper uses later medieval high-value English credit data as a proxy gauge of merchants’ business confidence or uncertainty. It discusses whether mercantile restriction of credit during the fifteenth-century recession reflects uncertainty, whereby merchants became increasingly risk-averse and so reduced the amount of credit they extended to their customers. It discusses the chronological trends in English lending between 1353 and 1532. This paper examines medieval debt restructuring and argues that this might similarly reflect merchants’ commercial confidence or uncertainty. In contrasting two sample years (1375 and 1433), the paper seeks to identify the motivations and influences that lay behind medieval merchants’ business decisions more fully. It argues that merchants’ investment behavior was guided more by local commercial circumstances than it was by profound economic shocks, such as plague and bullion famine.

商业信心是经理对组织的商业前景感到乐观或悲观的一种度量。本文使用中世纪后期的高价值英语信用数据作为衡量商人商业信心或不确定性的指标。它讨论了在15世纪的经济衰退期间，商业性的信贷限制是否反映了不确定性，从而使商人越来越厌恶风险，因此减少了向客户提供的信贷量。它讨论了1353年至1532年之间英国借贷的时间趋势。本文研究了中世纪的债务重组，并认为这可能同样反映出商人的商业信心或不确定性。与两个样本年（1375年和1433年）相比，本文旨在更全面地确定中世纪商人的商业决策背后的动机和影响。它认为，商人的投资行为更多地受当地商业环境的支配，而不是受到诸如瘟疫和金饥荒等深刻的经济冲击的支配。