There are plenty of reasons to be grateful for not living in the 18th century - disease, poor public hygiene, the lack of anything decent on television - but there is one area in which Georgian England had a clear advantage over today: interest rates. Unlike today, when once a month we get worked up about what the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee will do, the 18th-century equivalent of the MPC found a rate they liked, and stuck to it. For 103 years.

In 1719 the interest rate increased from 4 per cent to 5 per cent, and then did not change until 1822, when it moved down to 4 per cent again. Which must have given everyone quite a shock at the time.

It is not as if the financial world of the time did not have its excitements. There was the South Sea Bubble of 1720, in which many people lost all their money and a swath of banks failed, but from which the Bank of England (founded in 1694) emerged relatively unscathed. There were wars, which pushed up the national debt to scary heights (after the Seven Years' War it reached a 1763 peak of £132 million); there was the Second Jacobite Rebellion, which caused a run on the Bank, forcing it to pay out in sixpences to conserve bullion; there was even an attack on the Bank during the Gordon Riots of 1780. But interest rates? They just stuck there at 5 per cent. That it was illegal to do anything else may have had something to do with it; the usury law banned anyone from lending at rates over 5 per cent. The big reason, however, was that it just did not occur to anyone that they should change interest rates, on account that no one had got round to inventing monetary policy.

“The idea that one could use the interest rate to regulate the volume of credit was not really there before the mid-19th century,” said Albrecht Ritschl, Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. Then the usury law was repealed, and the Bank discovered the joy of playing around with interest rates to protect the gold reserves. Being bankers, they approached their new-found freedom with commendable caution: during the first four decades of the 19th century, the bank rate was changed only nine times. It was only later that things turned nasty.

War, as always, was the big problem. When the Crimean War got expensive, interest rates hit 10 per cent for the first time in 1857.

This was nothing compared with what lay in wait in the 20th century. When Germany declared war on Russia in August 1914 interest rates rocketed to 10 per cent, before stabilising at about 5 per cent. After the Second World War they crept up again as inflation took a grip, before reaching those terrifying peaks of 17 per cent in 1979 (step forward, Sir Geoffrey Howe) and 15 per cent in 1992 (take a bow, Norman Lamont).

So, interest rates are back down to their lowest level in history. Everyone - more or less - is happy; all we need now is the reintroduction of the usury law.

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