Today I learned that the earliest recognizable form of capitalism — the medieval English wool market — was basically created by Cistercian monks. The monks founded their order around 1100 and grew at breakneck speed. In the 1130s, they founded 76 new monasteries. By the end of the 1200s, when the European economy went into widespread recession, there were 500 Cistercian monasteries across Europe, Britain, and Ireland. As Bruce Campbell writes, the Cistercians were exceptionally "centralized, hierarchical, and successful... with a system of administration and communication that transcended national and ecclesiastical boundaries."

The monasteries were effectively property of the Vatican, and functioned like modern-day franchise businesses. While monasteries were traditionally places of study, worship, and theology, the Cistercians would enlist lower-class locals for agricultural work — primarily raising sheep. The monasteries were the main employer in many regions.

The monasteries helped reclaim huge tracts of fenland, marshland, highland, and woodland for pasture. This was during an era when the European climate was warming, opening huge regions of arable land and creating massive wealth through growing crop yields.

The monasteries — the largest landholder in the region — were the primary beneficiary of this windfall, especially the Cistercians, who became pioneers of English sheep husbandry, effectively creating an international market for wool that was supplied first and foremost by British monasteries. In Sacred Trust, Robert Ekelund writes that the Cistercians "provided the original impetus to extensive sheep farming."

The market was so robust, the monks sold futures contracts for their wool up to twenty years in advance, anticipating the futures markets that would arise in the Netherlands some centuries later. The monasteries were also technological innovators, adopting new technologies like watermills and windmills.

The monasteries acquired land through bequest and trade. The new international wool market created competition for land, which quickly dried up — since land is not a renewable resource. For the first time in English history, there was a shortage of land. Landlords raised rents. Peasants relocated to find cheaper land or — if there was none available — employment.