APPENDIX IV
THE MONETARY SYSTEM OF THE NETHERLANDS
In its earliest known form the Netherlands monetary system reproduces those features of the Carlovingian system which reappear alike in Italy, France, and England.
The ideal Flemish pound was divided into 20 schellingen, the schelling into 12 grooten.
This was entirely an ideal system; the actual coins being, at first, the silver denarius, divided into obols. This ideal system of pounds, schellings, and groots survived in Flanders and the Southern Netherlands (now the kingdom of Belgium) long after it had been superseded in the Northern Provinces (the United Netherlands) by another equally ideal system, that of the gulden and stiver.
According to this latter system the Flemish pound was divided into 6 gulden, the gulden into 20 stivers. As between the two systems, therefore, the Northern gulden was equal to 3 1⁄3 Southern schellings, and the Northern stiver to 2 Southern groots.
The earliest mention of the stivers occurs in 1355, but
it was a considerable time before the new system displaced the old one in the Northern Provinces, and the reckoning by schellings and groots as well as, or alongside of, that by gulden and stivers occurs in Holland even as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The weight system employed for the precious metals was as follows:—