Domestic money and early modern gift-giving in Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

This essay examines the forms of ‘domestic money’ in Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, focusing on familial gifts, ritual hospitality, and immediate monetary rewards. It argues that these forms of exchange structure relations across family, neighbourhood, and service networks within the commercial environment of early modern London. Rather than presenting monetary exchange simply as a force of moral corruption, Middleton depicts a world in which urban households increasingly participate in forms of prestige, sociability, and symbolic authority previously associated with the landed gentry. Meanwhile, gift-giving becomes a means through which urban citizens reproduce and compete for forms of status traditionally grounded in hereditary privilege. This essay aims to show that Middleton’s satire lies less in condemning commerce itself than in revealing how ordinary acts of exchange gradually weaken the hereditary exclusivity that once distinguished aristocratic privilege from commercial success. In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, hierarchy survives as a recognizable social structure, yet aristocratic distinction becomes increasingly performative, materially reproducible, and dependent upon circulation, display, and expenditure rather than inheritance alone.