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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2021
Christine Desan's Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism provides an authoritative answer to a fundamental question about medieval English money that has puzzled a few scholars, but that has been largely ignored by most: were medieval payments normally weighed or counted? The same question can be expressed differently as: were payments made by weight or by tale at face value; or again, was the value of money determined by its intrinsic content or by royal decree? But why might this curious distinction between counting payments and weighing them matter?
He remains an honorary curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His debt to the work of Christine Desan is writ large throughout this paper.
1. Desan, Christine, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2. Johnson, C., ed., The Course of the Exchequer (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1950)Google Scholar.
3. In 1205 and 1292, Challis, C. E., ed., A New History of the Royal Mint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 97Google Scholar.
4. The practice of shaving silver from the edges of pennies, which were then passed on at face value.
5. Later medieval scales for weighing individual pennies survive. Antiquaries Journal 55 (1975): 394–96
6. Thomas Bisson considers governments’ response to the wear of currency: Conservation of Coinage: Monetary Exploitation and its Restraint in France, Catalonia, and Aragon (c. AD 1000–c.1225) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
7. D. M. Metcalf, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Coin Finds, c.973–1086 (London: Royal Numismatic Society & Ashmolean Museum, 1998), Question 21, 56–69.
8. Desan, Making Money, 66 and note 142, “…most scholars believe that Anglo-Saxon coin traveled (sic) at face value.” Citing M. Allen, I. Stewart, P. Spufford, H. Peterson, and J. Bolton.
9. Challis, A New History of the Royal Mint, 105. The Mint generally received and paid by weight, but occasionally paid by number for some payments to the crown, and for instant exchange. Also for Edward I's re-coinage, see ibid., 119 and note 119 (sic) when Edward I temporarily exploited this re-coinage to gain extra profit. The Revised Treatise on the New Money is explicit that silver was normally both received and issued by weight, ibid.,124. For the twelfth century illustration of receiving and weighing coin at the Exchequer in the Eadwine Psalter, see Desan, Making Money, 81.
10. Rogers erroneously argued that such a rise in the value of silver would have affected all prices equally. Most historians recognize that inflation affects prices unequally, as changes in prices trigger changes in consumption. Rogers was much influenced by the fact that when prices generally fell, wages rose, failing to appreciate that the rise in wages was the result of the massive fall in population. See J. E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (Oxford: Swan Sonnenschein and Co, 1884) specifically on this point at 274–75 for the fourteenth century and 341–42 for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
11. H. A. Miskimin, Money and Power in Fifteenth-Century France (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 54–55; and J. H. A. Munro, “Money, Prices, Wages, and ‘Profit inflation’ in Spain, the Southern Netherlands, and England during the Price Revolution Era, ca. 1520-ca.1650,” História e Economia: Revista Interdisciplinary iv (2008): 41 note 83.
12. David Fox, ”The Case of Mixt Monies,” The Cambridge Law Journal 70 (2011): 144–74; and David Fox, “The Enforcement of Nominal Values to Money in the Medieval and Early Modern Common Law,” in Money in the Western Legal Tradition: Middle Ages to Bretton Woods, ed. David Fox and Wolfgang Ernst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 203–23.
13. Desan, Making Money, 83–97.
14. G.D.G. Hall, ed., The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England (Buffalo: William S. Heins & Co, 1997).
15. Desan, Making Money, 88, 89, 92.
16. Ibid., 134–35. The Exchequer assay is dated March 1248 n.s. Challis, A New History of the Royal Mint, 107–8.
17. Note, however, government instructions, Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1247–58 (H.M. Stationery Office), July 22, 1248, approving a period when both short and long cross circulated together and were not to be refused, which was a practical measure to facilitate the process of re-coinage without creating a serious shortage of currency. Desan, Making Money, 126 for mixed circulation of short and long cross types.
18. Desan, Making Money, 142–49.
19. The Indenture for the “Florin” coinage introduced in 1344 defined the new issue “at the weight of those commonly current.” Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles 39. The J.J. North Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 68. Those holding old coins of good weight had an incentive to re-coin them.
20. Other denominations almost always moved in step with the penny. For a detailed table of English Mint silver prices from 1158 to 1542, see Anthony Hotson, Respectable Banking: The Search for Stability in London's Money and Credit Markets since 1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 190–93.
21. David Fox, “The Enforcement of Nominal Values,” in Money in the Western Legal Tradition, 203–23.
22. Ibid., 215, 221. In 1464, Edward IV issued a proclamation raising the nominal value of the noble from 6 s. 8 d. to 8 s. 4 d. In 1465, he issued the new, heavier rose noble coin valued at 10 s. Hotson, Respectable Banking, 198–99.
23. Desan, Making Money, 135–36
24. Etienne Fournial, “L'indexation des créances et des rentes au XIVe siècle,” Le Moyen Age 69 (1963): 583–96. By specifying the actual coin types required in repayments, rather than the nominal value, French creditors sought to protect themselves from the inflationary consequences of debasement. For the clearest detailed summary of mutations in France also see Fournial's Histoire Monétaire de l'Occident Médiéva (Paris: F. Nathan, 1970).
25. Miskimin, Money and Power, 54–55 for France, and Munro, “Money, Prices, Wages,” 41 note 83.
26. Desan Making Money, 133 and note 72 for sources supporting Roman nominalism.
27. Ibid., 84–85.
28. Ibid., 148. More detailed consideration of the diverging English and continental legal attitudes to money is provided in David Fox, François R. Velde, and Wolfgang Ernst, “Monetary History between Law and Economics,” in Money in the Western Legal Tradition, 3–17 (contrasting the emphasis on valor intrinsecus or valor impositus).
29. Desan, Making Money, ch. 5, 194.
30. Note that England—unlike Scotland, France, the Burgundian Netherlands, and Italian city-states—did not usually lower the intrinsic value of small change relative to larger silver denominations, exacerbating the resulting shortage of small change.
31. Desan, Making Money, 195.
32. Ibid., 199.
33. Ibid., 203–4.
34. Ibid., quotations in order, 211, 215, 210.
35. Nick Mayhew and Katherine Ball, “Debasement and Demography in England and France in the Later Middle Ages,” forthcoming, expands on the far reaching social and economic consequences of this important Desan argument.
36. Nick Mayhew, Sterling: A History of the Currency (London: Penguin, 1999), 47.
37. Hotson, Respectable Banking, Table A. 3, 196, shows that from 1526 to 1542, 2.25d (twopence farthing) were struck from the troy pennyweight, whereas after 1560, the pennyweight yielded 3d.
38. See also Barrington v. Potter (1552), for a tender of money not accepted when due, which was complicated by debasements in 1546 and 1547.
39. Jennifer Bishop, “Currency, Conversation, and Control: Political Discourse and the Coinage in Mid-Tudor England,” English Historical Review cxxxi, No. 551 (2016): 763–92. Bishop cites TNA, C 1/1315/20–22, for Moxone v. Shepparde (the outcome of the case is not apparent) and similar cases, in TNA, C 1/1351/1–2; C 1/1349/9–10.
40. Bishop, Currency, 768–70, 772, cites Bishop Latimer, Thomas Smith, William Thomas, a clerk of the Privy Council, and Robert Recorde, mathematician and mint official, who all condemned the debasements, although disruption was widespread across the country.
41. Ibid., 785. Challis, A New History of the Royal Mint, 247.
42. Nick Mayhew, “Prices in England, 1170–1750,” Past and Present 219 (2013): 28. Mayhew, Sterling, 55–56 (Penguin pagination).
43. Bishop cites The Summarie of certaine Reasons, which haue moued the Quenes Maiestie to procede in Reformations of her Base and Course Monies (London, 1560).
44. S.G.Ellis, “The Struggle for Control of the Irish Mint, 1460-c.1506,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 78, Section C, 2 (1978), 17–36. Michael Dolley, “Anglo-Irish Monetary Policies, 1172–1637,” in Historical Studies VII, ed. J.C. Beckett (London: Routledge, 1969), 52–56, esp. 53. Desan, Making Money, 204–5.
45. Bishop, Currency, 766.
46. “The Case of Mixt Monies: Confirming Nominalism in the Common Law of Monetary Obligations,” Cambridge Law Journal 70 (2011): 144–74, quotation at 174.
47. This issue was somewhat complicated by the fact that the coins at issue were actually struck at the Tower in London.
48. The idea was seriously considered but rejected in 1626, 1640, and 1642. Mayhew, “Was Later Medieval Sterling Too Strong?” in Debasement: Manipulation of Coin Standards in Pre-Modern Monetary Systems, ed. Kevin Butcher (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020), 214–15. The constitutional history of Britain might have been different if Charles I had debased rather than recalling Parliament.
49. Desan, Making Money, 287–88. She also challenges the confident assertion of North, Douglas and Weingast, Barry, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989), 803–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50. Dumoulin, Olivier, “Aux origines de l'histoire du prix,” Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 45 (1990): 515CrossRefGoogle Scholar, records William Beveridge's unsuccessful attempt to persuade the committee of the merits of nominal, rather than silver weight prices. On the superiority of nominal prices, see also Mayhew, Nick, “Money in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century,” in Money, Currency and Crisis: In Search of Trust, 2000 BC to AD 2000, ed. van der Spek, R. J. and van Leeuwen, Bas (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 185–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51. Historical exchange rates are largely influenced by bullion content, but international comparison of living standards requires the study of price–wage ratios, rather than the conversion of prices to silver weight.