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.

商业信心衡量管理者对其组织的商业前景的乐观或悲观程度。本文使用中世纪后期高价值的英国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 15 世纪经济衰退期间的商业信贷限制是否反映了不确定性，商人变得越来越厌恶风险，因此减少了他们向客户提供的信贷额度。它讨论了 1353 年至 1532 年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了商人的商业信心或不确定性。对比两个样本年（1375 年和 1433 年），该论文旨在更全面地确定中世纪商人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到当地商业环境的引导，而不是受到瘟疫和金荒等深刻的经济冲击的影响。