The History of Currency, 1252 to 1896

by William Arthur Shaw

During the period under consideration, the seventeenth century especially, the monetary history of the Netherlands supplies the key to that of the surrounding nations. The history of her monetary exchanges has yet to be written, and of her Mint ordinances very little is accessible, as compared, e.g., with France. But this is more than compensated by the numerous "plakkaats" or proclamations of the tariff of coins, which are to us practical indicators of the rates of exchange. The Netherlands, as has been already said, were the centre of European commerce in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Italian States had been in the fourteenth and fifteenth; and every change in the precious metals or in the coins showed itself in the Antwerp Bourse as surely and swiftly as to-day in London. As prompt to take knowledge of these changes as Florence had been two centuries earlier, the authorities tabulated the various coinages which were current in the Low Countries,—and practically that meant the coinage of commercial Europe,—tariffed them against their own by proclamation, and instantly accommodated themselves to each new change or variation of value by a new proclamation and a new tariff. These proclamations, therefore, give us the measure and course of the monetary movements of the time in fullest and most welcome details.

It has been already shown that this action of the government of the Netherlands has a twofold aspect. From one side it expresses and regulates the natural flow and ebb of commerce, just as exchange rates and bullion remittances do to-day. And in this sense it was perfectly normal, healthy, and sound, more especially in so far as it provided for the gradual drawing away overplus metal to the East. But the Governments of Europe were yet under the spell of the delusion as to a balance of trade payable in gold—that delusion which was, later, dignified in history by the name of the mercantile theory. Nor had they yet lost the traces of that mediæval craft and lawlessness which rose from, and prompted to, the mere desire of robbing or pilfering their neighbour's store of precious metal as the first act of self-defence. Further than this the monetary system of Europe—unconsciously bimetallic and with an appalling variety of ratio prevalent at the same moment in different places—lay open, helpless and defenceless, and inviting to the bullionist, financier, or arbitragist. In so far as this element of national greed and dishonesty, or private and unprincipled gain, entered into the legislative enactments of the Netherlands, it condemns them as mercenary, and the monetary straits or tightness, not to say crisis and panic which ensued, as unnecessary and therefore in the highest degree lamentable.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ARBITRAGE

In a blind way the age saw what was going on behind the financier's screen, however little it under

stood the theory of it. In many a sixteenth-century document, preserved among the State papers in the Record Office at London, abuse is piled on the Netherlands for their practices in enticing away the coin of the realm. One of the correspondents of the Privy Council in the days of Elizabeth, 1575, writes thus from the Netherlands: "The Low Country merchants return great stores of money hither by exchanges, and by the proceeds, as the exchange may serve for their purposes, they send away her majesty's coin and bullion into the Low Countries in great quantities, and the rather by reason of the Hollanders trading with the East, by which means the realm will be secretly robbed, if it be not prevented." Twenty years later the whole subject was again gone into, for the fiftieth time, for the advice of the English Privy Council, and it was shown how "foreign exchangers contrived, by arranging a rise or fall in particular monies, to undervalue English monies, and draw them out of the kingdom. Prevention has been vainly attempted by Acts of Parliament, by sending over Sir Thomas Gresham to the Low Countries to complain, and by establishing the office of exchanger, which was discontinued as injurious to the State. A bank was proposed, but the Queen had not to spare the £100,000 needed to start it. It is now proposed to settle the exchange at 10 or 12 per cent., to be fixed yearly, according to the state of affairs, 20 per cent. or more being sometimes paid now."

The naïveté and helplessness of the suggestions

contained in these concluding words need not blind us to the real and pressing gravity of the monetary situation to which they relate, and which periodically beset each and every European Government throughout the centuries under consideration.

Such, therefore, is the aspect of these monetary ordinances or plakkaats of the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

To speak of them in detail.