[1334] Coleccion de Cédulas, IV, 388, 400 (Madrid, 1829).
[1335] As an incident to this fictitious valuation of the vellón coinage, counterfeiting flourished to an enormous extent, unrepressed by the severest penalties. The importation of coins manufactured abroad added to the confusion, for it was too lucrative to be prevented by even the most rigorous measures. In 1614 a chronicler states that since the recent doubling of the nominal value of the cuartos five or six millions in vellón money had been brought from England and Holland, stowed in vessels under wheat. It was exchanged for silver at 30 per cent. discount and the silver exported. The remedy devised was to bring inland twenty leagues from the coast the foreign traders engaged in the business, but this remedy was found to be worse than the disease and was abandoned (Cabrera, Relaciones, pp. 551, 553). We shall see hereafter that the Inquisition was invoked to put an end to this traffic.
[1336] Under these perpetual changes it will be readily understood how difficult it is to estimate values at any special period. In a document of 1670 I find the doblon converted into reales de vellón at the rate of 1 to 81, although in this case the doblon was of 4 pesos or 32 reales de plata. Similar to this is the conversion in another item of 162 reales de plata into 405 reales de vellón, showing that vellón was at a discount of 60 per cent. or specie at a premium of 150.—Arch. de Simancas, Inquisicion, Leg. 1476, fol. 2, 61.
The unutterable confusion produced by these sudden and arbitrary changes in the legal value of the coinage is illustrated by a contention, in 1683, between the auditor-general and the receiver-general of the Suprema, respecting the accountability of the latter for funds on hand and receipts and payments at the time when the pragmática of February 10, 1680, went into effect, involving points of which the equities were not easy to determine.—Ibid., Leg. 1480, fol. 129.
[1337] It was probably from this that the custom arose in giving receipts for money to reserve or to renounce, as the case might be, “las leyes y excepciones de la non numerata pecunia.”
[1338] Full information as to the coinage of the fifteenth century will be found in Saez, Demostracion del Valor de las Monedas que corrian durante el Reinado de Don Enrique IV (Madrid, 1805).
For the subsequent period reference is made to the very voluminous series of laws and decrees preserved in the Nueva Recopilacion, Lib. V, Tit. xxi; the Autos Acordados, Lib. V, Tit. xxi and xxii, and the Novisima Recopilacion, Lib. IX, Tit. xvii.
[1339] These instructions are supplementary to those issued by the assembly of Inquisitors in Seville, Nov. 29, 1484. Some of them are printed by Arguello, but they are not in the Granada edition of 1537 of the Instructions.
[1340] These instructions partly repeat and partly supplement those of December, 1484. So far as I am aware they are inedited. They are not in the Granada edition of the Instructions, nor do they correspond with the fragments printed by Arguello (Instrucciones del Santo Oficio, Madrid, 1630, fol. 16-23) as the Instructions of January, 1485, and by Llorente, Añales, I, 96-99, 388-94.
[1341] Both the Granada edition of 1537 and Arguello print only the first four articles of these Instructions. Llorente describes them (Añales, I, 261) as being in seven articles of which the last two are not in this original document.