1. English Money
In all times money has been the weight of a certain amount of copper, silver or gold, in the form of coins the fineness of which is guaranteed by the stamp of the State. The weight of coins used in payments may change in course of time, but the nominal unit of weights often continues, the pound, or livre, or marc, &c. Thus, the original Roman unit, the As, or mint-pound of copper or bronze, reduced gradually to 1/24 of its primitive weight, persisted as a money of account long after it had been replaced in the currency by the silver Denarius. This was originally coined at a time when it represented the value of 10 As; hence its name deni-aris, ten of copper.
The French livre, or livre d’estelins, reduced gradually to a coin about 1/74 of a 12-oz. livre, retains its name as a synonym of the franc.
The English pound of silver, once a Tower pound = 5400 grains, reduced long ago to 1745 grains, in 20 shillings, persists as a money of account, though the silver is superseded in payments over 40 shillings by a gold coin weighing 123-1/4 grains. Prices over 40s. are still often stated in shillings.
The Roman denarius originally weighed 60 grains, afterwards reduced to 52-1/2 grains. A golden denarius was also coined, which afterwards became the Arabic dinar.
Under Charlemagne the mint weight of France was heavier than the marc of Troyes afterwards adopted as a standard. Adapting the Roman system to the customs of his Teutonic subjects the emperor Karl divided the pound of silver into 20 silver solidi or sols, each equal to 12 silver penings or pennies of about 25 grains which, assimilated to the Roman denarii, were called deniers, also estelins or sterlings. The solidus appears to have corresponded to a Teutonic monetary unit, the shilling, equal to a variable number of penings, which coins were not of uniform value until about Charlemagne’s time.
The Carlovingian systems of coinage had passed to England long before the Norman Conquest, displacing the old Norse and Saxon systems—the Norse, in which the Ore was of 20 silver penings = 1/8 marc or 1/12 lb., and the Saxon Sceatta of 40 Styca, usually equivalent to pence. The shilling, = 1/20 pound of silver pence, became established—‘xxx scyllinge penega,’ thirty shillings of pence (‘Saxon Chronicle,’ 775). The Norman Conquest made no appreciable change in the English customary coinage. The Tower pound of silver which the Normans found established was coined into 240 of the ‘English peny called a sterling,’ each weighing 22-1/2 grains instead of the 25 grains of Charlemagne’s sterlings. Twelve pence made a shilling of 20 to the pound, and twenty pence or pennyweights made an ounce of 12 to the mint-pound.
England soon followed France, but much more slowly, in the usual dwindling of the weight of coins, as the king, pushed for money, ordered his moneyers to melt down the silver pennies and recoin them of lower weight. They remained at 22-1/2 grains down to the time of Edward I. Edward III’s first pennies were of 22-1/4 grains, but in the 18th year of his reign they weighed 20-1/4 grains, in the 20th year 20 grains, and after the 27th year he made the pound of silver yield 300 pennies at 18 grains. He also coined groats (great sterlings or grosses). Silver halfpence (mayles) and farthings (ferlynges) were coined, and a statute specially ordered that no sterling halfpenny nor farthing be molten ‘for to make vessel or any other thing by goldsmiths nor others.’
At this time, if we may believe the Statute of Labourers, one penny was the usual daily pay of the farm-labourer, but mowers were to have fivepence by the acre or the day. Prices of farm-produce were fixed. A penny would buy a chicken or six pounds of bread, 2 pence a fowl, 4 pence a goose.
The diminution in the weight of the penny was slow and did not affect wholesale dealings in which payment was usually made by weight.[[35]]
In all but retail transactions payment might be agreed to be by weight. In Stephen’s reign the land-revenue of countries was farmed out. The sheriff or ‘fermour’ of Wiltshire and Dorsetshire paid into the treasury £454 10s. by weight (ad pensum) and £262 4s. by tale (numero). He probably picked out the full-weight coins for payment by tale, and had to take (as perhaps he received) weight-value for the rest.
Under Henry IV the sterling had fallen to 15 grains; under Edward IV it fell to 12 grains, at which weight it stood till Henry VIII brought it down to 10-1/2 grains, and also debased it to only one-third its weight of silver. His father had coined shillings, hitherto only a money of account; his own mint continued this coinage, but got 48 of them, instead of 20, from the Troy pound of silver, and subsequently by debasement nearly 150.
In Edward VI’s reign the Protector Somerset continued this system, but, at his fall, efforts were made by the Council to restore honesty to the coinage, at least as regards the shillings and crowns. The pennies remained debased until the wisdom of Elizabeth restored the standard, and since that time our silver coinage has remained of true standard and at the weight of 7-1/2 grains for each penny value, or one-third of its weight at the time of the Norman Conquest. The Scots silver coinage fell much lower than that of England; by the time of the Union it had fallen to 1/36, the pound Scots being worth 20 pence English, instead of 20 shillings.
It is curious that the kings, so ready to make a profit by lowering the silver coins, appear to have disdained the evident profit of a copper coinage. Penalties were repeatedly threatened by statute against the copper coins which necessity of ‘change’ caused to be made or imported. These were unlawful coins called galyhalpens, saskyns, dodekyns and dotkins (probably Scottish ‘doits’). James I granted a patent for the making of copper farthings. Halfpennies were first coined in Charles II’s time, but it was not till near the end of George III’s reign that a copper penny was struck, probably because the tradition of the silver penny weighing 32 wheat-corns, albeit shrunken, was against the penny being other than silver.
The penny was at first a full ounce of copper. Twopenny pieces were also struck weighing two ounces.
The present bronze coinage was made in 1860 after the example of the bronze coinage of Napoleon III, the reformer of the French currency; it was he who established a gold standard in France, hitherto a ‘silver country.’
A bronze penny not much worn weighs 1/3 oz., the halfpenny 1/5 oz. The latter is one inch in diameter. The silver penny of early Plantagenet times was the size of the present sixpence but thinner, so that, at the full weight of 22-1/2 grains, it was slightly heavier than our threepenny piece = 21·8 grains. It bore the effigy of the king with ‘Henricus Rex’ or suchlike inscription; on the reverse was a cross, with pellets or other ornaments in the intervals, and the name of the moneyer and city, as ‘Edmund on Lin(coln).’ The cross gave rise to the idea that it indicated where the penny could be broken or cut into halfpence or farthings. Doubtless it was so cut where change was scarce; and the first silver farthing was coined by Edward I, 1279, to prevent this cutting up of the pence, but equally with a cross.
At present silver pence and twopences are only coined for Maundy money.
The groat of four pence, grossus sterlingus, first coined about 1279, discontinued from the time of Elizabeth, who first coined sixpences and threepences, was revived in 1836 at the instance, or insistence, of Joseph Hume, an M.P. who, it is said, found it convenient for the exact payment of an 8d. London cab fare not exceeding a mile in the days when copper pennies weighing an ounce were inconvenient to carry in the pocket. He died in 1855, and in 1856 the Joey was discontinued.
The threepenny piece was revived in 1845.
The florin was first issued in 1849, an ill-advised attempt at decimalising the pound; it bore the inscription ‘one tenth of a pound,’ but it has utterly failed to take the place of the convenient half-crown, an important unit in the binary division of the pound. Public convenience appreciates the gold sovereign and half-sovereign, the silver half-crown, shilling, sixpence and threepence. The florin is a disturbing coin offering no advantage over two separate shillings; and the double florin is worse.
No one wants the pound decimalised except a few decimal unpractical persons. A properly taught schoolboy adds up sums of money duodecimally for the pence, decimally for the shillings, converting these by twenties into pounds. It is quite easy to add up a column of pence thus: 8 and 5, 1s. 3d.; and 10, 2s. 1d.; and 8, 2s. 9d.; and 5, 3s. 2d. With the shillings column the units are put down and the tens carried to the column of tens; an odd 1 is put down and half the remainder carried to the column of pounds.
English silver coins are 37/40 = 0·925 fine, i.e. 11 oz. 2 dwt. of the now obsolete 12 oz. mint-pound.
French five-franc pieces are at 0·900, other silver coins are 0·835 fine.
Gold Coins
Of the two precious metals, only one can be the standard of value. In a gold-standard country, as England has been since 1816, the golden sovereign of lawful weight is the standard of value. As the price of silver, like that of every other commodity, varies with demand and supply, it would be futile to attempt to make silver coins correspond in actual metal value to gold coins; especially as, since the great fall in the price of silver from its demonetisation in many countries and its large production, silver coins are really tokens; tokens of value, but still tokens, not legal tender above a certain amount. A shilling melted down is only worth fivepence or less; while sovereigns melted down can be exchanged, at a trifling charge, for their weight in minted gold.
In silver-standard countries it is gold which varies in price. Thus in India, where for centuries the standard of value has been the silver rupee now weighing 180 grains and worth fifty years ago a little over two shillings, gold coins of the same weight called ‘mohurs’ were current at market price, about 16 rupees more or less. Sovereigns were worth about 10 rupees in 1860; they would exchange now for double that price did not the Government of India, by restricting silver coinage and other legitimate devices, keep the gold price of the rupee at about 1s. 4d., so that 15 rupees will buy a sovereign for transactions with England and other gold-standard countries.
Gold was coined in ancient Rome. The gold solidus or aureus of Constantine was 1/72 of an As or mint-pound; so that it weighed 70·14 grains. It was called ‘solidus,’ entire, as distinguished from the semissis and tremissis, its half and third. The original French sol, or shilling, was an ‘entire’ of 12 deniers; hence the £ s. d. we use were once the current signs, in France and elsewhere, for libræ, solidi, denarii.
There were some gold coins of the early Saxon kings. Under the early Norman kings foreign gold coins were current, but the first regular gold coinage was that of Edward III; his Noble of fine gold, 1/50 of a Tower pound, weighed 108 grains, the weight of two golden florins of Florence or of two ducats or zechins of Venice. He afterwards coined nobles at the rate of 42 to the mint-pound; these weighed 119 grains, and, as they were of 23-7/8 carats fine, contained almost exactly the same weight of pure gold as the modern sovereign of 123-1/4 grains. Their value was about half a marc or 80 sterlings of full weight, and as the proper weight of silver in English coins was then three times that at present, the 6s. 8d. equivalence of the noble then is that of the sovereign now.
The weight of gold coins mattered little in practice; they were always weighed, and represented an amount of sterling varying according to the state of the money-market and to the condition of the silver coinage.
Edward IV’s noble was called a Rial; and the Angel, 2/3 of its weight or about 80 grains, was also coined. Henry VII coined a double Rial of half a Troy ounce. Under Henry VIII this was called a Sovereign.
The fineness of gold coins, originally of 23 carats 3-1/2 grains = 994·7 gold in 1000, was reduced to 22 carats under Henry VIII and, after some variations, this standard = 916·6 gold in 1000 was finally adopted.[[36]]
Sovereigns or Unites were coined under James I at 172 grains, under Charles I at 141 grains. Their value in silver varied of course according to market-rates for gold. Coined under Charles II at 130 grains they were henceforth called Guineas, varying in value from 30 to 20 shillings. Repeated attempts to fix their value by law utterly failed. In the eighteenth century it was generally above the 21s. standard at which the guinea is still reckoned as a polite coin. In 1816, on the adoption of a gold standard, the name of Sovereign was revived for the coin which is its basis.
The sovereign weighs 123·274 grains, of which 113·006 are pure gold. It is light if it weighs less than 122-1/2 grains, that is if it has lost more than 1-1/2d. in value. Its life of current weight is about 20 years in ordinary circumstances of circulation.
The mint value of gold is £3 17s. 10-1/2d. an ounce Troy; that is 2·1212 pence a grain pure, or 1·7676 penny at the standard fineness of 22 carats = 916·6 in 1000.
France adopted a gold standard in 1855; other countries followed.
The United States adopted it in 1900.
The sovereign is coined at full value without ‘seigniorage.’ In France and other gold-standard countries a charge is made for coining. In France this charge is 6 fr. 70 c. on the kilo of standard gold, 0·900 fine, value 3100 francs; this is equal to 0·216 per cent., so that 20-franc pieces lose 4·4 centimes or nearly a halfpenny each on being melted, besides assay charges.
The history of mint-weight will be further told in [Chapter XX], section ‘The Carat and the Grain.’