Hostname: page-component-599cfd5f84-jhfc5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-07T07:25:34.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Sovereign Counterfeits: The Trial of the Pyx

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Simon Wortham
Simon Wortham*
Affiliation:
University of Portsmouth, England
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

On 9 May 1611 James I broke with a royal custom that had been established for more than a century of Tudor rule. He attended the trial of the pyx at the Royal Mint in the city of London. This yearly ceremony was for the formal testing of sovereign moneys. It was designed to ensure that the manufacture of various denominations conformed to current standards set by the crown. While his Tudor predecessors had allowed previous trials to continue unattended by majesty, James's presence at the pyx in 1611 provided the occasion for a striking display of royal power.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , Summer 1996 , pp. 334 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akrigg, G.P.V. Jacobean Pageant, or The Court of King James I. London, 1962.Google Scholar
Ashley, Maurice. England in the Seventeenth Century. London, 1978.Google Scholar
Ashton, Robert. The City and the Court 1603-1643. Cambridge, 1979.Google Scholar
Ashton, Robert. The Crown and the 1640. Oxford, 1960.Google Scholar
Aylmer, G.E. The Struggle for the Constitution 1603-1689. London, 1963.Google Scholar
Benn Michaels, Walter. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley, 1987.Google Scholar
Bergeron, David M. English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642. London, 1971.Google Scholar
Challis, C.E. The Tudor Coinage. Manchester, 1978.Google Scholar
Coleman, D.C. The Economy of England 1450-1750. Oxford, 1977.Google Scholar
Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age: A History of England 1603-1714. London, 1985.Google Scholar
Daniel, Samuel. Panegyric Congratulatory. In The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First. Ed. Nichols, John. Vol. 1. New York, 1966.Google Scholar
Davies, Godfrey. The Early Stuarts 1603-1660. Oxford, 1959.Google Scholar
Dekker, Thomas. The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James. Vol. 2 of The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. Ed. Bowers, Fredson. Cambridge, 1955.Google Scholar
Dietz, F.C. English Public Finance 1485-1641. London, 1964.Google Scholar
Drayton, Michael. A Paean Triumphall. In The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First. Ed. Nichols, John. Vol. 1. New York, 1966.Google Scholar
Durling, Robert M. “Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of Hell.” In Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute 1979-1980, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen, 61–93. Baltimore, 1981.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London, 1991.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature. Baltimore, 1983.Google Scholar
Gould, J.D. “The Royal Mint in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Economic History Review 5 (1952): 240-47.Google Scholar
Green, Thomas Andrew. Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Jury Trial 1200-1800. Chicago, 1985.10.7208/chicago/9780226306438.001.0001Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, 1980.Google Scholar
Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Ithaca, 1991.Google Scholar
Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution 1603-1714. Wokingham, 1988.Google Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Macpherson, C.B.. London, 1968.Google Scholar
Houston, S.J. James I. London, 1973.Google Scholar
Howes, , Chronicle (excerpt). In The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First. Ed. Nichols, John. Vol. 2. New York, 1966.Google Scholar
James, Mervyn. English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485-1642. Kendal, 1978.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. Panegyre on the Happie Entrance of James our Soveraine to his First High Session of Parliament. In The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First. Ed. Nichols, John. Vol. 1. New York, 1966.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. Part of King James’ Entertainments. In Masques and Entertainments of Ben Jonson. Ed. Morley, H.. London, 1890.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. The Golden Age Restored. In Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques. Ed. Orgel, Stephen. New Haven, 1969.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. Volpone, or The Fox. Vol. 3 of The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson. Ed. Wilkes, G.A.. Oxford, 1981.Google Scholar
Kapstan, David Scott. “Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 459-75.Google Scholar
Larkin, James F., and Hughes, Paul L., ed. Stuart Royal Proclamations. Vol. 1, Royal Proclamations of King James I 1603-1625. Oxford, 1973.Google Scholar
Lee, Maurice. Great Britain's Solomon: James VI and I and His Three Kingdoms. Chicago, 1990.Google Scholar
Levin, Harry. The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance. Bloomington, IN, 1969.Google Scholar
Lockyer, Roger. The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England 1603-1642. London, 1989.Google Scholar
Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford, 1964.Google Scholar
Marcus, Leah Sinanoglou. “City Metal and Country Mettle: The Occasion of Ben Jonson's Golden Age Restored.” In Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. Bergeron, D.M., 26–47. Athens, GA, 1985.Google Scholar
Middleton, Thomas. Part of the Entertainment to King James. Vol. 7 of The Works of Thomas Middleton. Ed. Bullen, A.H.. New York, 1964.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. “‘A Huge Eclipse’: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty.” In The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen, 7–40. Norman, OK, 1982.Google Scholar
Oman, Charles. The Coinage of England. Oxford, 1931.Google Scholar
Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley, 1975.Google Scholar
Outhwaite, R.B. Inflation in Tudor and Early Stuart England. Hong Kong, 1982.Google Scholar
Parry, Graham. The Golden Age Restored: The Culture of the Stuart Court 1603- 1642. Manchester, 1981.Google Scholar
Petowe, Henry. England's Caesar. III The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First. Ed. Nichols, John. Vol. 1. New York, 1966.Google Scholar
Pye, Christopher. “The Sovereign, the Theater, and the Kingdome of Darknesse: Hobbes and the Spectacle of Power.” In Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt, Stephen, 279–301. Berkeley, 1988.Google Scholar
Russell, Conrad. The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509-1660. Oxford, 1978.Google Scholar
Salgado, G. The Elizabethan Underworld. London, 1977.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. I Henry IV. Ed. Humphreys, A.R.. London, 1960.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. Brown, John Russell. London, 1955.Google Scholar
Spiegel, Henry William. The Growth of Economic Thought. Princeton, 1971.Google Scholar
Supple, B.E. Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642. Cambridge, 1964.Google Scholar
Tanner, J.R. English Constitutional Conflicts of the Seventeenth Century, 1603-1689. Cambridge, 1928.Google Scholar
Waite, A.E. The Secret Tradition in Alchemy. London, 1969.Google Scholar
Wilson, Thomas. A Discourse upon Usury. Intro. Tawney, R.H.. London, 1925.Google Scholar