I. HAMMER-STRUCK COINS

I. HAMMER-STRUCK COINSAuthor(s): John CraigSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 98, No. 4831 (6th OCTOBER, 1950), pp. 946-959Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41364240 .

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THREE CANTOR LECTURES ON

BRITISH COINS AND COINAGE

By Sir John Craig, K.C.V.O., C.B., LL.D.,

lately Deputy Master and Controller of the Royal Mint

I. HAMMER-STRUCK COINS

Monday , 24 th April , 1950

In the United Kingdom as in other great industrial states, all sizeable payments are now made by transfers of paper. The nether limit for which notes are provided was settled for us by their replacing former gold coins. That they are the better adapted for that purpose is indicated by the coyness in returning to gold coin for domestic use of the people of these islands after the struggle against Napoleon, and of the United States of America after their Civil War. Below the old gold level, the United States has continued to mint vast quantities of silver dollars, but uses dollar notes instead, while the silver five-shilling piece has been ousted from circulation in the United Kingdom by general dislike, the explanation in both places being that it is inconveniently large. A German savant, Schüssel, indeed, put the acceptable upper limit of size of coin in European states as absurdly low as a diameter of 24 mm.

Every traveller is familiar with notes for very trifling values ; Massachusetts issued a note for a penny as long ago as 1722; but from paper money of that sort there is reversion to coin at the earliest opportunity. Small and compact counters are not only the handier for those small payments of erratic amount which constitute the vast majority of retail transactions; they are cheaper to the issuer than small notes. Their cost is greater at the outset, but coin lasts as many years as notes for trifling amounts do weeks, or even days, and nine- tenths of the original material is recovered when it must be redeemed. The Belgians calculated many years ago that economy alone pointed to metallic currency up to the old five francs.

A strictly logical system, in which each coin is exactly double the next below, would require 8 pieces to cover the British range from the farthing to the half- crown, 120 times as valuable, 2 7 being 128. The British coins in circulation are,

946



6ТН OCTOBER 1950 HAMMER-STRUCK COINS in fact, eight, but they are less evenly arranged. They originated as the penny, its half and its quarter; the shilling, its half and its quarter; the tenth and the eighth of the pound. All of them but the two-shilling piece have been in use for four centuries and upwards; the fractions of the penny run back 200 years more; and the penny has been coined for nearly twelve hundred.

This continuity cloaks a reversal of doctrine and function. Coins today are sub-divisions of notes. Notes, which played no part till the end of the seventeenth century, and the negotiable instruments which preceded them, were till a generation ago symbols for coin. Bullion money was "the blood of the Commonwealth,' Coin value depended on the costliness of its material, with a doubtful grace for the cost of manufacture. A kind of "find the lady" trick often confounded minting costs and kingly profits with the addition of alloy - at points so far apart as the twelfth century, Henry VI I Ts debasement and the Scottish gold of James VI and I - so that an owner of reputedly pure bullion received back in coin the exact weight of his metal, while the increase of mass paid the charges. Later theory tended to identify true worth with break-up value, but when England began to coin in a base metal, its low value in relation to the work done on it forced principles into the open; the ideal face value of copper coin was defined in 1672 as the intrinsic value of the metal plus the costs of coining and issue. At that point break-up value fell to half face value and ceased to have

practical significance. Devotion to expense for its own sake was, however, so

deeply rooted that, as late as i860, Switzerland included in its smallest coppers 5 per cent of silver, although so small an infusion could be neither perceived nor profitably retrieved.

Secondly, though export of English money was illegal almost continuously from the end of the thirteenth century, the net was looser than today ; the law was seldom wholly effective, and it was a dead letter long before its repeal in the nineteenth century. Foreign money also flowed into England; if it contained as much bullion as English coin, it was frequently legal tender, and inferior coin generally circulated freely until strong action was taken by the Crown. In both

ways the domestic use and provision of coin was affected by international trade.

Thirdly, the quantity of coin in circulation wa¿ outside central control. The mints were open to coin for anyone, commoner or king, and their output depended on the private judgment of those who owned bullion or foreign coin. It was the business of Government to see that minting attracted them. The total

charges, including the king's seignorage, came down for the three centuries

1351-1666 to an average of 3.1 per cent for silver and 1 £ per cent for gold; for long periods only ' per cent was charged for gold, which must have been below the full cost of minting. To attract further custom to the Mint and swell the circulation, these charges were abolished in England in 1666 and the expenses of the Mint were transferred to taxes.

The first of our modern denominations came in as a new type of silver coin,, clearly minted by a change of technique and created about a.d. 760 for Central and South-Eastern England by Offa, King of Mercia, who was moved by coinage reform and the creation of "a new denarius" in France. The new English coin

947



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS ÓTH OCTOBER I950 was a denarius also, or, later, a sterling, in formal documents; but the vulgar called it from its inception a penny. In form, it was the breadth of our sixpence, though only half as thick. As the i /240th part of a local pound or pounds of silver, the weight swung from 18 or 19 troy grains up as high as 24, but settled down at 22 J. A corresponding pound of 5,400 troy grains, known as the Mint or Tower pound, continued to be the measure of coinage until 1526, although the troy pound of 5760 grains had been adopted by other bullion users as early as the reign of Edward I.

The penny was gradually adopted by the other kingdoms. Their unification under Alfred was followed by his assertion of the royal prerogative over all coin and the universal insertion on it of the king's name. Not till about 970 were orders given, by Edgar, for identity of design throughout the realm; for the addition to the royal name of a sketchy effigy, which neither Offa nor Alfred had put on more than half their coins ; and for the record on the other side, in practice round a cross, of the name of the town where the coin was struck and of the man in charge of its striking.

figure i. Obverse and reverse of a penny of M their ed I (863-71) (N.B. In this and all succeeding figures coins are reproduced actual size)

figure 2. Obverse and reverse of a penny of Cnut (1016-35)

Actual minting, requiring but the simplest equipment, Was a local and widely •dispersed activity. At least 70 to 80 towns and villages, one half of them harbours, the rest mostly at the crossing of great traffic routes, had each its minter, often

948



бТН OCTOBER 1950 HAMMER-STRUCK COINS more than one, in the first half of the eleventh century, while after the Conquest there are reckoned to have remained active

In 22 towns ... ... i moneyer In 18 to 20 towns ... 2 moneyers In 13 to 15 towns ... 3 moneyers In 6 towns ... ... 4 moneyers In 3 towns ... ... 5 moneyers In 5 towns ... ... 7 to il moneyers

In all there were 67 towns with 180 to 185 autonomous moneyers. These local privileges were gradually surrendered in the second half of the twelfth century, and by its end coinage was confined to London and Canterbury, save for two or three petty Church Mints and for those occasions, about twice in a century, when some of the older mints were revived for a year or so to meet the pressure of a recoinage. All mints other than that in the Tower were wound up at the end of Edward VI's reign. This development, so seemingly natural, was unparalleled elsewhere in Europe. France still had 27 separate mints in the time of Queen Anne, and the last mint outside Paris was only closed in 1879.

To secure uniformity of design, all moneyers were required to purchase their dies from the king's engraver in London, whose monopoly became for over three centuries after the Conquest a lucrative and inheritable private business.

His dies were cylinders of iron wrought by casting and forging, of which one end was filed and rubbed flat and smooth for the design. Detailed collation of coins has shown that four types of tool were used under the Saxons for cutting dies : a pointed punch made dots and beads, a little chisel short straight lines ; these first incisions were widened by a cutter, and a sort of gouge scooped out all that could not be resolved into points and straight lines. Punches, as the most convenient tool, were gradually elaborated; at the Conquest, the engraver is thought to have used as many as a dozen of different shapes, of which none was large enough to make more than part of a letter. Labour was economized during the twelfth century by extending these letter punches as maids of all work to other features ; by such uses as the curve of а С or G for an eyebrow, the whole die was constructed by punch work, with deplorable results on the appearance of the coin. With advances in metallurgical skill, larger punches became possible ; a complete and specialized punch ior each letter, and even for so large an element as the crown, had been evolved towards the end of the thirteenth century. The dies were of two shapes. The lower, the "pile", ended in a spike which was driven into a section of a tree trunk to serve as anvil. The upper die or "trussel" was finished with a flat or mushroom head to take the blow of a hammer.

Blanks were made in the mints by casting silver into thin sheets, further reduced by hammering, from which the disks were cut out and trimmed by scissors. A blank having been laid on the face of the embedded die, the worker steadied the upper die with one hand while he struck up the coin with several blows, from a hammer of two or three, pounds.

Fineness of bullion and of coin was assessed by the use of a touchstone. This close grained black rock is rubbe,d with a bit of model silver and with the silver

949



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS ÓTH OCTOBER I95O under test. A difference in hue of the two smears betrays a variation of standard of perhaps 20 parts in 1000, in the case of silver round sterling fineness. As the proving pieces in the numerous mints cannot have been uniform, a considerable spread in the fineness of their pence might be expected. In fact, however, such analyses as have been made suggest that the typical range of late Saxon and early Norman times was from 920 to 940 fine silver. A law of Ethelred II shows that the better coins were believed to be pure silver.

Quantitative assay was recovered in the twelfth century. Three documents in the Red and Black Books of the Exchequer deal with it: The Dialogus de Scaccario written in 1178 or 1179; a memorandum of 1247 or I24^ on impending coinage of the latter year; and the Tractatus de Nova Moneta , of which the relevant portions may have been written in the 1280s and were certainly penned by someone whoše first-hand knowledge ceased before 1344.

Cupellation, as improved at the end of the seventeenth century, was worked thus. A piece of silver of 30, still later of about 15, grains and beaten thin, was weighed in an enclosed balance sensitive to 1/128 grain. Wrapped in a thin sheet of lead of equal weight and with further lead added to make up thrice the weight of silver, it was placed in a cupel of bone ash; a number of cupels, some containing control specimens of coin standard fineness, were placed on a muffle in a furnace, which was then filled with live charcoal, for the lead to flux and carry away all base metal into the cupel's porosity; the furnace was allowed to cool, to avoid loss by spurting, before the specimens were taken out after, in all, 15 minutes. Their weights gave the fineness of the originals after two pennyweight in the pound, equal to 8^ parts a thousand, had been added to the first reading to correct for absorption of silver by the cupel.

In 1178-9, the process, already long established at the Exchequer, was a refining rather than an assay operation ; 240 pence, say 5000 to 5400 grains, taken at random from the money under trial, were placed in a cupel of " burnt ashes", with some lead. The cupel was placed in a furnace, with unstated routine precautions, and the operation was considered complete when a sort of darkness ceased to hover within the molten surface and tiny particles began to rise and dissolve on reaching it. The money under scrutiny was abated proportionately to the entire loss shown by the trial pound, without discount even for legitimate alloy. The scribe adds that the fineness of pence formerly was and ought legally to be only 6 d or 25/ioooths below the fineness of the assay ingot, and Suggests 5o/ioooths as a typical current difference.

The 1247-8 document also states that moneyers were entitled to alloy pure silver by 25/ioooths of copper, this increase of mass by 6 d in the pound con- stituting their remuneration; but that the current money of that day was 4o/ioooths below purity. The inference is that the final product of cupellation at both dates was only about 950 to 960 fine; the standard of reference in France, apparently once considered pure, remained for centuries Argent le Roy , 958 fine. If so, the legal fineness of English silver coin was 925 to 935, and the actual average fineness in 1247, 910 to 920.

For the recoinage of 1248, standard plates both of conventionally pure silver

950



бТН OCTOBER 1950 HAMMER-STRUCK COINS and of silver of the fineness proper for pence were made for the Exchequer, for Richard, the king's brother, to whom the operation was contracted, and for each mint employed in it. The mint trial plates weighed only two ounces. An assayer within each was required to try one blank in 40 before striking and a proportion of finished coin.

Startling advances were made in the next twenty-five years. The fineness of pence was properly defined in 1274 as 11 oz. 2 J dwt. in the pound of 12 ounces, or 926 fine. The quarter pennyweight was dropped, and sterling fineness became 925, before 1357.

In Edward I's great reorganization of coin and coining and thence- forward, standard trial plates of coin fineness alone were provided for Exchequer and Mint. The Exchequeř plate of 1279 survives; including as silver 2 parts of gold which could not be distinguished by the methods used, this plate is in fact 923 fine. The Tractatus de Nova Moneta actually puts the fineness of current English coin at precisely this figure (1 Ss 5 'd of silver to 1 S'd of copper); it states that the money brought in for recoinage was 1 'd less fine, 917, but that still older coin was marginally above 923.

The Tractatus states that the sample used for assay had become 240 grains "in modern times". Thus every grain which survived the assay furnace could be read without calculation as one pennyweight per pound of fineness in the original. The correction for the constant error in the process had already been fixed at two pennyweight in the pound, and the Tractatus insisted in addition that three assays should always be made and that the highest reading of the three must always be accepted. Assayers of that date worked to a quarter grain, 1 part in 1000. The cupellation method never became more accurate than this for comparing silvers. In absolute measurements by different hands, the error in its findings was of the order of 5 to 10 parts per 1000.

Improvement of assay was only one of the drastic changes made in 1279 by the two, or possibly three, experts whom Edward I, a great administrator, fetched from the South of France. Production processes, from melting to striking, throughout the country were brought under a single Master Worker, who for a fee of 5 'd a pound paid all current expenses and staff. With this consolidation, the names of moneyers ceased to be required on coin. The formal trial, which had been usual for some time past, before the King's Council of sample coins put aside in the Pyx chest from each journée of 10 pounds was made a regular three-monthly obligation though often in practice intermitted for years. It survives ás the Annual Trial of the Pyx at Goldsmith's Hall.

The method of making blanks was changed. Molten silver was moulded into square bars of the same cross section area as a coin, and these were sheared into slices. Circularity was obtained by beating in the angles of the slices. Weight was no doubt adjusted by filing, possibly by clipping rims. Blanks were annealed, and at times, apparently exceptional, blanched, that is treated with alum, salt or acid to get a white pure surface.

The penny, having now been the solitary coin of the nation for half a millennium, was, as everyone knows, cut into halves and quarters for small

951



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS ÓTH OCTOBER I950

figure 3. The Paris Mint c. 1500

change ; much as in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Mexican dollar was divided into fragments in Africa, Australia and the West Indies. Halving and quartering of coin was supposed to be done only in mints ; even if this restriction could have been fully enforced the method was open to obvious- abuses, and regular halfpence and farthings had often been proposed and even ordered by authority. When they were instituted in 1279 the reason for delay became clear ; four farthings cost more to mint than one penny. Enough bullion was subducted from each farthing to cover this extra expense ; copper in greater quantity was added to make the coin of reasonable size. Thus the first farthings- were only about 700 fine and separate trial plates of that fineness were made for testing it. In this country dual standards have always been considered pernicious. The farthing was raised to sterling fineness in a year, but was then kept below its proper proportionate weight to defray its excess cost. A great or groat sterling of 4 d was launched but was too large a sum in one piece to be acceptable and was- soon forgotten.

Die-cutting was temporarily taken away from the hereditary business ; in new hands, a pleasant face in gracefully moulded relief took the place of the old line drawings. Attempt at portraiture ceased. The king was mature and bearded; the coins portrayed a pretty boy, whose features continued to serve all kings to come until the later years of Henry VII.

952



бТН OCTOBER 1950 HAMMER-STRUCK COINS The next step was the introduction of gold, which the loot and trade

connections of the Crusades had drawn back to Europe in quantity. Henry III made a pass, overborne at once by the City of London, at a gold coinage in 1257. By the early part of next century, the international trade of the Continent was largely run on Italian gold coin, among which the florins of Florence held pride of place; English merchants selling abroad for gold and requiring silver to buy afresh at home, lamented the loss of all their profits in the exchange.

figure 4. Lefty effigy of Edward I on groat from 1279. Right y effigy of Henry VII on groat to 1504

figure 5. (Jbverse ana reverse of noble , 1340-00, oj Edward 111

Edward III, after failure of his negotiations for an international coin, brought out three gold denominations of his own in January 1344. The middle coin, the leopard, was exactly the weight and fineness (994-8) of the florin and was priced at the same figure, 3s. The smallest coin, the helm, was naturally is 6 d and the double leopard 6s. It at once became clear that bullion content was not all that mattered. Foreigners refused to rate the innovation with the known coin of Florence, which had the backing of an elaborate banking organization and passed readily everywhere, while in our own internal markets gold was not wanted at all. The new issue was withdrawn in a matter of ninths.

It was succeeded in July 1344 by three new coins, popularly and ultimately formally dubbed nobles, half nobles and quarter nobles. A Tower pound had

953



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS ÓTH OCTOBER 195O been cut into 50 double leopards of 108 troy grains each ; it made only 39 ' nobles of 136*7 grains. The new issue was directly linked in value not with the Italian coin but with the mark, a weight and monetary unit of two-thirds of a pound, commonly used in reckoning large sums. The noble was half a mark of silver - 6 s 8¿ - its value being increased over the discredited issue much less than its gold content. This second shot proved to have overshot the target; in 1346, the yield of a pound weight was raised to 42 nobles of 128-6 grains, and in 135 1 to 45 nobles of 120 grains.

Engraving was again taken temporarily out of the hands of the regular house, and the designs and style of work are quite different from those of the silver coins, which can only be distinguished by exacting and expert care from those of the king's grandfather.

Gold was tried at first by long firing. Later, as now, the sample beaten thin was wrapped in a quantity of silver, generally three times the weight of the gold, and then in lead. The two fine metals were cleansed of base metal by cupellation in a furnace as in the silver assay ; the silver was then parted from the gold by solution with the royal liquid, aqua regia , a mixture of nitric and hydro- chloric acids, and the weight of the residual gold gave the fineness of the original specimen. Controls and standards of reference continued to be coin of Florence for 130 years, and a representative of the Italian city was allowed a watching brief at the Trials of the Pyx.

The year of gold's introduction saw also a new policy on defects in the silver circulation. The small, thin, lightly struck, pence would have worn very fast under present-day usage; what they escaped by more respectful handling, they lost by their liability to clipping, which was made easy by lack of definition of the rims and badly centred designs. Now, clipping, as seventeenth-century experience shows, flourished when the circulation had already lost its standard ; the clipper cut to below the falling average any piece found above it. When all confidence in the money was lost, worn and clipped coin was simply demonetized and withdrawn as bullion, to be recoined at the expense, including a fee to the king, of its owner, six times after the Conquest - in 1 108, 1 157, 1 180, 1205, 1247 and 1279. On average, thrice a century, a man could lose a third of his cash at a blow.

In x344> the Mint were ordered, instead, to reduce the weight of new coin to, or towards, the average weight of that in the circulation; the penny was dropped by 10 per cent to 20 grains; seven years later, in 135 1, after the cataclysm of the Black Peath, William Edington, Bishop of Winchester and Treasurer of England, "loving the King's commoditie more than the wealth of the entire realm" knocked off another two grains. That mortal plague destroyed ancient ways and gave money more importance in the economic machine. The groat was resurrected and the half groat introduced ; silver currency then ran in a neat geometric series b h 2> and 4- An extraordinary decision, however, gave the Master of the Mint the same piece rates for all silver denominations in place of the differential rates hitherto allowed. The groat, the cheapest for him, became the dominant coin of the next two centuries, and half-way through that period we hear of people again cutting up pence to provide themselves with change. 954



бТН OCTOBER 1950 HAMMER-STRUCK COINS

The reduction of weight in 135 1 probably took the new coin below only the best of that in circulation, for no great quantity came in for recoinage. Like reductions of weight followed at intervals of 50 to 60 years - in 1412, 1464, and 1526. The silver coin dropped successively to 300, 360 and 480 pence to the Tower pound and 540 to the Troy pound. The reduction of 1464, after the Wars of the Roses, went beyond the needs of the case to get the king a temporary profit; for the rest the reductions, including that of 1351, while always explained as due to conditions abroad, seem to have kept new and existing coin broadly in step. The rate of fall averaged about 0*25 per cent per annum; the wear of small silver coin in the nineteenth century was about 0.35 to 0.4 per cent per annum.

To base international dealings on two metals is difficult; aliens sometimes demanded payment in gold; and others refused anything but silver; and the worth of gold in terms of silver was interminably debated. Nevertheless, the ratio reached in 135 1 was maintained, with the one exception of the revision of 1412, until 1601 ; one ounce of British coin of fine gold was kept equal to 12 ounces of sterling silver coin. Thereafter the metals drew further apart.

The weights of £1 of silver coin and of £12 of gold coin declined thus:

£1 Silver £12 Fine gold ^ate

I (troy grains) (troy grains)

Originally 5,4°° - Late thirteenth century 5,33a -

January, 1344 ... 4,800 4>320 July, 1344 4,800 4>922 1346 ... 4,800 4,626*6 1351 4>320 4>32° 1412 3>6°° 3>888 1465 ... ... ... 2,800 2,880 1526 2,560 2,560 1543 ... ... ... debasement period 1552 i,920 x,920 1601 1,858 1,906

£12 gold 916*6 fine

1601 1,858 2,063 1612 1,858 1,690 1619 ... ... ... 1*858 1,686 1663 1,858 1,553 1717 1,858 I,479 1816 i,745 M79

J

955



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS ÓTH OCTOBER I950 In the case of silver, the weight of each denomination was reduced and its

face value kept unchanged; with gold coins, which were presumably less worn or clipped at the time of consideration, the tendency was to raise the value and create a new denomination. The weight of the noble, having come down less than silver in 141 2, was actually increased to its former level at the revision of 1464; with a change of the design on one side to a rose charged with the royal arms, it became the first 10 s piece, under the name of Ryal or Rose Noble. A new lighter coin was created in its place for the familiar 6 s 8d value; the

figure 6. Obverse and reverse of the angel , 1 470-1

figure 7. Ubverse and reverse of sovereign of Henry VII (1405-1509)

figure 8. Portrait used 1 504-26 of Henry VII , on shilling

956



6ТН OCTOBER I950 HAMMER-STRUCK COINS

king was jettisoned, leaving the ship on the one side, and on the other the cross was replaced by St. Michael slaying the Dragon. After a few years this 6 s 8 d ousted the ios coin completely till the reign of Henry VII. This king, a lover of magnificence and the arts, brought out in 1489 the first 20 s piece by minting a double ryal, which he christened the Sovereign - in the opinion of some, in its later editions the best' coin ever produced by the English Mint. The ryal, still retaining till James I the monarch in a ship, became the 10 s piece. Henry VIII added the £2 and Charles II the £5 piece.

The sovereign was followed in 1504 by the earliest shilling; an even more striking change in that year was the adoption by the king for silver coins above the penny of the lifelike portraiture which had lately been adapted in Italy from medal work to coins. This was the first real likeness to appear on an English coin, but old habits stood; Henry VIII retained his father's portrait for the first 18 years of his reign with the singlé alteration of VII to VIII, just as Edward VPs government retained on many coins his father's image with the boy's name. Thereafter the rule was to portray the actual lineaments of the monarch. A German, Alexander of Brugsaal in Bavaria, was the artist who composed the sovereigns and the portraits.

Henry VIII created two more gold coins at his first and perfectly honest revision of 1526. Few halves and quarters of ryals and angels having been struck, the country was flooded with small foreign gold. The coinage of 22-carat gold in England began with his new pieces, crowns and half-crowns as they were called after one of the displaced coins, the écu a la couronne , or shield with the crown. Those foreign coins were of finer gold and the formula of 1 1 parts of gold to i of alloy, afterwards shown to be approximately the best compromise between durability and other considerations, was apparently due to the Mint. The alloy is shown by the trial plate to have been intended at the oikspt to be almost wholly silver, but in practice varying proportions of copper were also added, until in the late 1820s the melting of gold coin for the extraction of even minute percentages of silver became profitable, and a purely copper alloy had to be adopted. The other coins remained of 994-8 fine gold. The angel having advanced to 7 s 6d , a new 6 s 8d piece was thought to be required. The design was the other great slayer of dragons, St. George. But evidently accounting

figure 9. Obverse and reverse of George noble c. 1526 of Henry VIII

957



JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS ÓTH OCTOBER 1950 ideas had changed, or the pair of coins were too close in value, for few of it were struck.

Henry VI 1 1 is debasement came many years later, after the loot of the monasteries had been dissipated. It was a cold-blooded operation. The Mint were first ordered to prepare samples of all varieties of foreign standards for the king's inspection, and it is clear from its stipulations for larger remedies, or in the more extreme debasements for no limits at all, and for higher fees, that it was cognisant of the phenomena of liquation and other difficulties in working low grades. The king, for his part, aware that debasements elsewhere had immediately been followed by falls in the purchasing powers of coin, had a great quantity minted in advance to get quick off the mark.

The debasement, advancing each year, was of very limited duration, for the consequences were so tragic that it had to be undone in the next reign. Its permanent effects were a distrust of changes of fineness and a further reduction of the weights of existing denominations to keep down the cost of restoration of sound money. Lavish supplies of silver from South America, the increasing use on the Continent of coins of dollar size, and higher prices caused all but one of the other modern silver coins to be introduced in this restoration of a money of confidence - a crown and half-crown in silver and a half and a quarter shilling. They were the first English coins to be marked with their date.

Alternating and even concurrent issue of coins of fine gold, for values of 30$, 155 and 7 s 6dy and of 22-carat gold, embodying the 20 s unit, continued tilt the closing years of Elizabeth's reign, when the latter triumphed. The angel indeed went on being minted in fine gold for use in healing sufferers from the king's evil, until the applicants for a profitable health service became too numerous, and cheaper substitutes were provided to reduce the cost. But new gold coins for general circulation were all in the modern standard, and the sixpence put the groat out of business. Scottish coin, a late starter of the twelfth century, was modelled on English till the middle of the fourteenth century, when it fell under French influence. The difference between English and Continental coinage policy was exemplified by its course. On the accession of James I and VI to the southern throne, Scottish coin was again made uniform with English on the basis that twelve northern pence equalled one southern.

The two-and-a-half centuries of secular reductions of English silver coin were over, and it was altered no more after 1601 until 181 6. But the 20 s gold coins and their multiples and fractions persisted in rising above the valúes assigned them by royal proclamations, and their weights were thrice reduced, in 1604, 1 619, and 1663, *n efforts to get back to a round figure. The changes produced successively the Unite, the Laurel and the coin which the people called the Guinea because gold was now coming from that coast of Africa. Like its pre- decessors, this 20 s coin rose to 21 s 6 d soon after its issue.

Meantime another metal was forcing itself to notice. As early as the reign of Henry VII, the shortage of the smallest change induced the use of privately produced tokens for farthings. The legal farthing, further diminished in size, was discontinued entirely and the halfpenny became uncommon with Edward VI.

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бТН OCTOBER 1950 COINS OF THE MACHINE AGE

Devaluing of Henry's base money produced coins worth § d and 1 'd. Elizabeth, for the sake of small change, continued these coins in silver; a man could in theory buy a farthing's worth by paying a penny and receiving back the first, or the worth of a halfpenny by paying the second and receiving back a penny. Tokens naturally proliferated. On the Continent copper had come to be coined in one country after another in place of shrunken and degraded silver coins, from about 1500, and Scotland had followed suit. Nevertheless, James I would not venture on a state coinage of base metal ; with a verbose apology to the nation on the mischiefs of unregulated private tokens, and the virtues of thrift, he sold to Lord Harrington, and to others after his death, the monopoly of making farthings, to be issued for voluntary circulation and not to be legal tender. The mode of manufacture was by

" engines" which rolled copper into thin

plates ; these were stamped with rows of farthings before being cut up into coins. Monopolies being odious in any case, the Parliament stopped the coinage soon after the outbreak of the Civil War. Still, the monopoly of coin by the precious metals had been broken.

II. COINS OF THE MACHINE AGE

Monday , ist May , 1950

Italians of the Renaissance, Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini, evolved rolling, cutting and stamping machines, from shortly before 1500, to better their medals. The aim was aesthetic - perfect circles, smooth fields and higher reliefs. Tried on coins in the mints of Italy, the machines were improved in Germany and filched thence by France; a mechanized mint, partly driven by a water wheel, was set up in Paris in 1554, in which year some sort of a rolling mill was tried also in the London Mint. A discontented workman of the Paris Mint, Eloi Mestrell, deserted to London and was granted by Queen Elizabeth's Council in 1561 facilities in the Tower for coining gold and silver in the new way. A modicum of machine-struck coins is'sued for a decade; the method was probably expensive and certainly slow ; an official enquiry reported that the old ways were ten times as fast; and the experiment and Mestrell's employment ended in 1572.

What survived was a device for uniform spacing of the beads which frame the design. A punch with twin studs was probably used, much as today. Two depressions were struck into the die on a line traced by a compass; the punch was shifted; with a stud in one of the pits, a third hollow was sunk by the other ; and so the circle was followed round. Nor were machines more successful ш Paris. They were taken off coins and confined to medals in 1 585.

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I. HAMMER-STRUCK COINS

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