Financial knowledge and the emergence of a private clientele for banks: Hoare’s Bank and some early women customers

"The last decade of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth century are noteworthy in banking history for being the period when goldsmiths were transformed into bankers. This was also the period when private customers began to use banks and when banks began to expand their services and their customer base beyond the needs of merchants alone. We can see private individuals learning to use what Voth and Temin refer to as ‘an emerging technology’. Gradually, and unevenly, the bank replaced the network of local and family debt and credit which had previously characterised the financial affairs of wealthier individuals. Landowners who had used short term, small scale credit relying on personal reputation and character to make payments at a distance, through a network of local contacts, to relatives and dependents, to tradespeople and for professional services now began to transfer this business to the bank. And their relatives and dependents likewise started to use the bank. The archives of Hoare’s Bank provide evidence for both these developments in the crucial early decades of the eighteenth century and also demonstrate how personal the bank’s business was. This was not a business in which bankers needed to be assured of the solvency of their customers, it was one in which customers needed to be assured of the solvency of their bank. The lustre of rich and well-connected customers brought the bank valuable business. Hoare’s Bank’s customers were connected through blood, through marriage, through politics and through religion, they assured one another of the solidity of the bank. The records show, too, how customers learnt to use the new facilities available to them and how discriminating they were. These developments are exemplified in the financial careers of six women customers of the bank which shed light not only on the kinds of private transaction they conducted but how selectively they used the bank’s services, combining old and new technologies to manage their financial affairs. The correspondence and banking records for Mrs Jane Bonnell and the Ladies Betty, Ann, Margaret, Frances and Catherine Hastings show how they adapted to the new economic circumstances and facilities available to them."