August 25, 2021 • 33 mins
England’s currency is in crisis. The issue is a “great leak” likely to sink the nation, ands Mint officials are scrambling to fix long before Newton steps foot in his new workplace. How did the nation get into this mess? And how will they strengthen the currency to protect it from counterfeiters? The answer will determine the career of both Isaac Newton and William Chaloner.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is an I Heart original, so picture this. It's
early January, it's cold and wet. You're cold and wet.
You're in London, close to the Thames, where the narrow
streets are filthy and prone to flooding. You decide to
head to a coffee house for a nice, warm dish
(00:27):
of coffee. Yes it is a dish. You approach the
bar and the woman behind it. A dish of coffee
goes for about a penny, but pennies really, all silver
coins are in short supply these days, so what are
you going to pay with? You plunge your freezing fingers
(00:51):
into your pocket. If you're a woman, this pocket is
a little pouch tied to your waist. And if you're
a man and your fashion forward, it's sewn into your clothes.
But let's be honest, you're definitely a man if you're
going to a coffeehouse, because most ladies weren't permitted. You
pull out a silver penny, an old, busted, handhammered silver
(01:15):
penny made before the restoration of the monarchy, some thirty
odd years prior. You place your penny on the counter nervously.
The coffee house made eyes it suspiciously. She picks it up,
testing the weight in her hand. It's a little bit thin,
the edges look worn. From what she can tell, the
(01:38):
king on it has been dead for more than half
a century. Is she going to accept it? Given where
we are in time, there's a very good chance that
she won't. So why would the coffeehouse maid reject your
busted penny money's money? Right? Well, yes and no, because
(02:02):
right about now, that's a bigger question than you might think,
and it's one that will dictate not only the career
of Isaac Newton, but also William Challoner. For I Heart Radio,
I'm Linda Rodriguez mcrabie and this is Newton's Law and
I Heart Original podcast. You are making episode two, No
(03:04):
Silver Linings, Act one. For what it's worth, the coffee
house made might not take your coin because it's so degraded.
But the fact was, in early most of the coins
being traded throughout the country were degraded. England's currency is
(03:29):
in crisis. You know that if you spent a lot
of time in coffee houses, because these are places where
people talk, and one of the things people were definitely
talking about was the ongoing problems with the coinage, because
the terrible thing when a man cannot poaches a dish
of coffee for want of coin, I blame the mint.
Barely the thin worn coins. Shopkeepers refuse them, and one
(03:54):
can barely discern between counterfeits, and they've justly made. There
are rumors that Parlament men and the Treasury and the
men are all planning to do something about it, but
as yet they haven't. So while everyone holds their breath
and waits for whatever the government decides, the status of
your particular coin hangs in the balance. The coffee housemaid
(04:17):
can decide that your coin is simply too busted and
turn you down, but then that means she's missing out
on a sale, or she can accept a coin that
is possibly worthless, or at least worth less. So say
she does accept your battered coin, maybe against her better instincts,
and you get your dish of coffee. You settle down
(04:39):
at a table. There are a couple of newspapers and
gazettes and pamphlets around, and you listen to the chatter
I have heard. The doctor is Newton is to be
the warden of the mint. Indeed, I do hope you
should have more to do with the affairs of the
mint than the last warden. Okay, what was going on
(05:02):
with the coinage? Well, we are going to get into
that big time because it's the reason for this whole shebang,
but we're going to first put that question on hold.
We're going to start with another question. What actually is
a coin? At its most basic coin is money a
(05:25):
representative way to store value. We can exchange that value
for other things, goods and services. So money is a
medium of exchange, a way to facilitate trade or purchasing.
And from way back in the day, metal was ideal
for this representative exchange function because it was something that
most people agreed had inherent value, It was easily transferable,
(05:48):
it was durable, and it was easily divisible on like
say a cow. Metal coins date back to around six
b C with the Lydians people and what's now to Turkey.
Minting started in Britain in the second century b C
with the various Celtic tribes, and then in a more
regular way with the Romans. There was a mint in
(06:09):
London dating from the third century, but then the Romans
left and London went through a kind of wild adolescence.
But By the time about For the Great, the ninth
century Anglo Saxon ruler who really laid the groundwork for
the unification of England's various sovereign states, there was a
working mint in the city turning out the kingdom's coins.
(06:30):
By the seventeenth century, England's monetary system was based on
a bi metallic standard, high denomination gold coins and lower
denomination silver coins, and the coins derived their value from
the actual weight of the gold or silver they contained.
A penny, for example, was worth a penny because that
(06:50):
was the value of the twenty four grains of silver
it contained. Because unlike today where we have coins and
we we just hand them over, the kinage in the
eighties six nineties relies on its weight in silver to
give it its value. That's Chris Parker, historian at the
Royal Mint. As in the same royal mint that Alfred
the Great started back in the ninth century and the
(07:12):
one that Newton becomes warden of in the seventeenth century,
and that still makes our coins now in the twenty
first century. Anyway, value based on weight seems very logical.
But here's the problem. By the sixteen nineties, many many
of the coins in circulation, like You're busted penny did
not contain the amount of silver their face value promised
(07:35):
they did. So if you had a coin that was
reduced in weight because it had silver removed from it,
it had lost some of its value, and you could
go to a shop and try and buy a shillings
worth of goods with a worn, battered, degraded shilling, the
shopkeeper isn't going to take that shillings value because he
can see it's lost weight. So as a huge problem
from an economic perspective that you're affecting trade. So, yeah,
(07:58):
you're lucky got that coffee, But why wouldn't your penny
contain those twenty four grains of silver? After all? Isn't
it the job of the Royal mint to make sure
that it did well? Yes, but in the six nineties
several long simmering problems had just come to the boil.
(08:18):
First start, many of the coins were so degraded because
the vast majority of those coins were hand hammered. Hand
Hammering was how coins had been made for pretty much
as long as there had been coins. This was an
imprecise process. Coins were never each quite the same. The
engravings were often off center. The edges weren't milled, meaning
they didn't have the finish or the grooves that you
(08:40):
see on modern coins. This irregularity meant that they degraded
or looked degraded more easily, and some people, a lot
of people took advantage of this. The easiest and perhaps
most damaging way people messed with the coinage was clipping.
People would him off a tiny amount of metal around
(09:02):
the edge of the coin, then hammer the coin thinner
to make up the size, and then they'd gather up
all those tiny silver shavings, combine them and melt them
down into bars or ingots and sell those off. This
was free money, and it was easy to get away
with because it was difficult to tell a coin that
was intentionally clipped from one that was just old. Everybody
(09:22):
was degrading the coinage because it was in such a
poor state anyway, and so once you get a majority
of people doing it, it's it sort of takes away
the stigma of doing something illegal, particularly when it's being
done by respected banker's shopkeepers. People were just doing it
on a regular basis. It sounds almost trivial, what's a
(09:44):
little off the edges, But This was a tremendous problem
because again it degraded the actual value of the coin
in your hand. Philosopher John Locke wrote, I do not
see how in a little while we shall have any
money or goods at all in England if clipping be
not immediately stopped. Clipping is a great leak, which for
(10:06):
some time past has contributed more to sink us than
all the forces of our enemies could do. Some Mark
and Newton included even suspected that foreign powers were trimming
English money just to synchronation that much faster. The terrible
state of the hand hammered coins also meant that they
were easier to counterfeit using less valuable materials. You didn't
(10:29):
even have to do a very good job. Well, if
you can imagine what you're trying to counterfeit is nothing
except a very very badly worn blank disc with some
vague images on it that's over a century old. Incredibly
easy because you don't have to be a very good artist,
You don't have to be a very good engraver. You
can knock up some incredibly substandard eyes and you can
put something out there that very easily resembles a batted,
(10:52):
worn shilling sixpence or half crown that was over a
century old. It wasn't that difficult. Counterfeiting and clipping often
went together. Sometimes clippers would melt down all those little
slivers of silver to use in counterfeiting new coins. Clipping
was so widespread that counterfeiters often clipped their own fakes
(11:12):
to make them seem more authentic and counterfeiting well. Counterfeiting
was so rampant that some estimates claimed that one out
of every ten coins in circulation was fake. That was
super bad for people at all levels of English society,
from the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the butcher, baker
and candlestick makers. Not to mention the seventeenth century baristas.
(11:37):
Silver was the lifeblood of the economy. This is what
everyone would have used to pay for daily expenses. If
there wasn't enough of it to go around, or if
what there was was debased and distrusted costs rows astronomically,
economic life ground to a halt. The thing was, it
(11:59):
didn't have to be this way. The Mint had a
solution right there in its workshop. Act two. Msieur Blondeaux
and his marvelous machines. Peter blonde was an engineer at
(12:22):
the Paris Mint when he was noticed by England's Parliament
in sixte How and why he was noticed I don't
know that. The important part is that the Treasury Committee
believed that Blondo had worked on improving the French coin,
specifically with using these new machines to mill, press and
edge coins, and that he could be persuaded to come
(12:47):
to England. This was a year of massive political upheaval.
Charles the First was beheaded by the Parliamentarians, ending the monarchy.
Oliver Cromwell appeared in general ame Lord Protector of the
newly made Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Wales, and he
also canceled Christmas. The change in regime necessitated a change
(13:11):
in coins, after all. In addition to being a medium
of exchange, coins are also an easily disseminated reminder of
who's in charge. Blundo was invited by Parliament's Mint Committee
to demonstrate his milling and edging technique in sixteen fifty.
That year, after showing his very fine pieces to the committee,
(13:32):
Blundo published a pamphlet a bit of propaganda, describing the
benefits of his machinery. A humble representation of Peter Blundo,
followed by another a most humble memorandum from Peter Blunde.
Spoiler alert, these were not humble. Blondo started by pointing
(13:53):
out everything that was wrong with hand hammered coins. The
money coined with emma can not to be made exactly long,
nor equal in weight and bigness, and is often ghostly
marked and have many odds of folds, which gives a
great facility to the false coiners to counterfeit it also
to the clippers to clip it, it being very hard
(14:16):
to discern between eclipped piece in one note clipped. Blondo,
as the Treasury knew, had a better way. Milt coinage
was a German invention dating as far back as fifty
Instead of hammering an image into a blank coin, Milt
coining used a screw press to sink the engraving deep
(14:37):
into the metal. The innovation was brought to France, where
the mechanism was improved and adopted by the engineers at
the Paris meant the machines produced regularly sized and weighted
coins with precise images, which made them more difficult to counterfeit.
But Blondo's edging technique was the real start, allowing him
to put a grooved finish or even a phrase on
(14:58):
the edges. This would make a coin nearly impossible to
clip without detection. Blundo wasn't the first to introduce these
machines to the Royal Mint, however, previous attempts had largely failed,
and you can chalk that up to a few things.
The cost of setting up and running the new machines
was considerable, and they were rumored to break down easily.
There was also the English distrust of anything foreign, especially French.
(15:23):
But perhaps more significantly, there was the fact that the
Company of money Ears, more or less hereditary Union Slash Guild,
had had the exclusive contract with the Mint to produce
the coins for centuries, but in sixteen fifty the New
Commonwealth needed new coins, and the Treasury was willing to
(15:43):
give Blundo a chance. The money Ears for obvious reasons,
We're not It didn't help that Blundo not only wanted
their job and claimed they were rubbish at it, but
he also accused the money Ears of corruption. In his pamphlets.
He alleged that the hammered coin fresh from the Mint
was of disparate weights, and that this was intentional and
(16:06):
it was the poor he said, who suffered for it,
which turns to the great ruin and destruction of commerce
and undoing those poor people who spend their money little
by little. Blondo was essentially accusing the money Ears of
serious corruption, of fraud. This really piste them off, of course,
(16:29):
and they came back with a pamphlet of their own,
a most humble remonstrance for Peter blonde Also not humble.
The moneyers responded that Blondo couldn't do anything that they
couldn't already do, branded him a liar, and slammed him
for daring to claim that the money they made was
ill favoredly coined. Blondo, they said, not only maligned the
(16:52):
good name of the company of money Ears, but also
most falsely to imprint in the hearts and minds of
all people in Christendom, and more especially the good people
under the obedience of the Parliament of England, that the
monies of this Commonwealth are not justly made. Blondeau was
undermining not only English confidence in the currency, but global
(17:15):
confidence in it as well with his force and scandalous libels.
In sixteen fifty one, the Treasury decided to settle the
matter with a competition a money off. Treasury officials said, fine,
each of you design and make a half crown, a
shilling and sixpence coin, and we'll see which ones are better.
(17:37):
David Rammage, the provost of the moneyers, was their champion.
Provost was an elected position, meaning that Rammage was a
man of some reputation and power. And now in the
Great money Off of sixty one, this reputation and the
reputation of the company and its contract with the Mint
was on the line. I mustn't file damn that frenchman's
(18:00):
block ready set money make Brammage made the coins in
the way that they always had, Using a hammer in
his own hands, he placed the plan, set the blank
coin on the anvil die to get the alignment perfect.
(18:28):
Holding the top die in place, he swung the hammer,
bringing it down on the die and stamping the image
into the metal. One done, h two oh three. Blundo
and his team meanwhile got his machines rolling one two, three,
(18:54):
ten seconds remaining. I. By the end of the allotted time,
(19:14):
Rammont had made twelve coins, twelve coins that were a
bit wonky, that didn't quite look all the same, twelve
coins that looked like most of the money passed throughout
the Kingdom, which is to say not great. Blondo meanwhile
made three hundred coins, three hundred perfectly weighted, regularly sized
(19:36):
coins of impeccable quality and design, complete with a lettered
edge that no clipper could clip. On the half crown piece,
it read truth in Peace Ste Peter Blonde's inventor facet
That's Latin for he made congratulations to Mont Senior Blondo
and his marvelous machines. Ram failed Blundo one. But despite
(20:05):
the fact that Blondo's machines were clearly superior, the treasury
passed on them. They just couldn't afford it. After all,
it takes money to make money. But then a stroke
of luck, the English fleet captured a load of Spanish
treasure at the Battle of Cadiz in sixteen fifty six,
and suddenly the Commonwealth was able to pay for Blondo
(20:27):
and his machines. But then Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell's death
in sixteen fifty eight more or less ended the protector
at experiment, and it left Blundo without well a protector.
He shipped his machinery off to Edinburgh and himself back
to France, and he would have stayed there too, had
it not been for the terrible quality of the coins
(20:49):
minted for the restoration. King Charles the second Blundo was
invited back in sixteen sixty two, and this time given
a twenty one year contract. The money ears might even
have gotten to keep their jobs too, because these machines
still needed skilled men to run them. So the monarchy's
back blunders back and Christmass back to Huzza. Things should
(21:11):
have been good, right whoa not so much? Act three
Fighting the Silver Bullet. In sixteen sixty three, Samuel Peeps,
(21:34):
the famous diary writer, a guy who was everywhere in
the seventeenth century, toured the mince facilities. This was just
after Blundo set up shop. Some of the machines were
meant to be secret, but Peeps was a man who
knows some people. He later becomes one of Newton's closest friends.
We were sharing this method of making new money from
the beginning to the end, which is so pretty. They
(21:58):
say that this way is more charged to the king
in the old way, but it is meter freeer from
clipping or counterfeiting. The putting of the words upon the
edge is not to be done without an engine of
the charge, and noise that no counterfeit will venture upon,
and it employs as many men as the old and
speedy for the next thirty years. The Mint used these
machines to make the coins when they made the coins,
(22:20):
which wasn't an all the time kind of thing. If
you want a sense of what made Peep so giddy,
listen to Chris Barker describe how they worked. The Mint
will get the raw bullion coming in and then they
will melt down the gold and silver and they will
cast them out into thin strips to get them to
(22:41):
the correct thickness for coining. The next part of the
processes you put them through a machinery which actually blanks them.
So you're getting the blank discs out of that strip
of metal, and they'll be weighed to make sure that
the correct weight, and then you've got a sufficient blank
and ready for processing. You will end up striking the
(23:02):
coin using something called screw press, a ginormous t shape.
The blank was sandwiched between the dyes which carried the images.
One was on the end of the tea and one
was on the anvil. Two strong men would turn the
screw press, wishing the blank in between the person you're
(23:23):
gonna reserve your sympathy for as a gentleman who's doing
the putting the blanks on and flicking the finished coin
all or off, because they've had their fingers crushed repeatedly
by having several tons descend on them as they're trying
to put blanks and flicked finished coins off. Finally you
get a finished coin after that striking process. The smaller
(23:50):
coins had a milled grooved edge, and the larger coins
had a phrase decks at tutaman, which was Latin for
a decoration and a safeguard. Fun fact, this phrase was
on the coins until two thousand seventeen when the new
pound coin was introduced and the machines did do what
Blondo promised they would. It was harder to clip a
(24:12):
machine mild coin, and it was harder to counterfeit them,
and yet clipping and counterfeiting persisted. In fact, they got worse.
Why because the Treasury never recalled the old hand hammered coins. Honestly,
it is exactly like the scene in foulter Geist when
Craig T. Nelson is all, you moved the cemetery, but
(24:34):
you left the bodies, didn't you. And just like in
foulter geist. The old coins caused all kinds of problems.
This basically left two sets of coinage in the country,
the good new machine mild coins and the bad old
hand hammered coins, and both were legal tender. Silver was
still being clipped off the old coins and much the
(24:56):
time leaving the country to be sold elsewhere. Counter Fit
coins flourished because your basic coiners could still do a
brisk business knocking out messy hand hammered coins. Meanwhile, some
clever if you like William Chaloner had figured out how
to fake these supposedly unfakeable coins. Compounding the problem. People merchants,
(25:17):
especially tended to hoard the good coins. Chris Barker, You've
got these brand new, lovely regular coins. What are you
going to do. If you're a normal individual who sees
these coming into coming into them through the banks and
through their change. You're not going to use and spend
those brand new coins. You're going to hold them because
(25:38):
you know they have a good value. So if you're
slightly and scrupulous, what you'll do is you melt down
the good coins because you know exactly the way, you
know exactly the fineness. You can create bullion, which you
can then sell onto the continent as a profit. The
price of silver had recently gone up in some markets,
meaning that silver was worth more as buoy on the
(25:59):
raw metal basically in continental Europe than it was as
face value coins in England. This is what's called arbitrage,
which is basically exploiting the difference in price commodities fetch
in different markets for a profit. So English silver is
being sold for continental gold, leaving only the bad, old,
degraded coins in the hands of the people, and by
(26:22):
the sixteen nineties it was estimated that only one out
of every two hundred coins was a machine milled coin.
The rest were old and busted and below weight or
just straight up fake. What all of this added up
to the clipping the counterfeiting the arbitrage markets was that
there was a serious shortage of silver, and the longer
(26:44):
the old coins stayed in circulation, the longer clippers and
coiners stayed in operation, and the supply of silver coins
perpetually shrank. By now, the stock of real silver coins
from the pennies to the crowns had dwindled almost to
the point of extinct. That might explain why the coffee
has made took your penny. She didn't know when she'd
(27:04):
see another. The situation became more problematic after the so
called Glorious Revolution of which removed the Catholic King James
the Second from the throne and put his Protestant daughter
Mary and her husband, the Dutch Prince William of Orange
on it. The new regime needed new coins. These are
(27:27):
a representation of royal authority and royal power even back then.
Still for a lot of people in rural area, is
the only sort of representation that they would have of
the monarchy. You want to have this image of authority
coming across by your coinage, not you don't. You don't
want to be represented at home and abroad by a
coinage that is it's such poor condition that you can
(27:50):
barely stand musta. But it wasn't just about how things
looked again, the coin is the representation of the monarch.
If it's busted, folks might start one, or if the
monarchy is busted too. If you go boil it back
down to the basics, think about what a coin is
and why we actually have any designs on a coin
at all. The design is on there to show that
(28:11):
this piece of metal, this this piece of silver is
of a given value, in a given weight, and as
royal approval. You know it's got the seal of Royalty
on it. Therefore you know you can trust it, and
you know you can accept it. And this gets us
to the heart of what a currency really is. Trust.
It's an agreement at this moment in history, it's an
(28:32):
agreement that this shilling weighs this amount of silver because
the king or queen really Parliament says it does. The
marks on the coins were a shorthand for the value
they represented, but also represented the authority that guaranteed that value.
So if the people don't trust the currency, if the
people can't agree that this penny is worth a dish
(28:53):
of coffee, then the people have a problem and the
government has an even bigger problem. This is also why
the punishment for counterfeiting or clipping was so severe, public
disemboweling and head on a spike severe. These were socially
and economically destabilizing crimes that hacked at the authority of
the government. In William Lowndes, the Secretary of the Treasury,
(29:20):
wrote to the country's brightest thinkers to ask them what
to do, including Isaac Newton, who was still lecturing to
the walls up in Cambridge. Economics as a discipline hadn't
really been invented yet, so Lowndes was casting his net
pretty wide for solutions. Newton, like pretty much everyone else,
had the same answer. Recall all the old bad coins,
(29:43):
make them no longer legal tender, and remnt them duh.
Newton also suggested that the Treasury make the intrinsic and
extrinsic values of the money the same. The intrinsic value
of the coin was its value on the market. The
extrinsic was the face you. By making those the same
and reducing the silver content and devaluing the currency in
(30:05):
the short term, it would keep people from being able
to make money off melting it down and selling it
in another market. The Parliament didn't agree to that kind
of currency manipulation, although they probably should have. You go
too far, Newton too far? Anyway, it shouldn't have taken Newton, philosopher,
John Locke, architects or Christopher Wren, East India Company governor,
(30:28):
Sir Josiah Child, and a bunch of other prominent people
to convince Parliament, but it sort of did. In late
Parliament finally agreed. So gone are all these medieval thin pieces,
and we've instead of replaced with you know, shiny, new thick,
machine struck coins that look magnificent. That's that's what they
(30:50):
decided to go for with the great recoinage of It
was going to be expensive, very expensive, because of how
degraded the coinage was. It would take three old coins
to make two new coins. The treasury would need to
make up that lost silver from somewhere, and it's not
like England had a ton of silver mines kicking around.
(31:12):
Not to mention, England was also broke, like invent the
national debt broke, but more on that later. In addition
to fighting an expensive war with France, one of the
knock on effects of the silver shortage was that people
tended to pay their taxes in bad coin. This meant
that the treasury was being shorted, taking in coin that
didn't weigh as much as its face value said it did,
(31:33):
and therefore wasn't worth as much. But the recoinage was
the only way to stop the loss of silver from
the country. Confound the coiners and clippers, William Shalloner among them,
and shore up the country's fledgling financial institutions. Parliament passed
the Recoinage Act on January and the melting commenced the
(31:55):
very next day. But if anyone thought that this whole
thing was going to be easy, and based on the
way Newton was offered the Warden Gig, at least some
people did well. Nothing considerable coined of the new and
now only current stamp. Of course, such a scarcity that
(32:18):
tumults are everyday feared. Join me next time on Newton's
Law to find out exactly how Isaac Newton, that prickly
genius saved England. Basically. Newton's Law is a production of
I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me Linda
(32:39):
Rodriguez mccrobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer
is Emily Marinoff. Our executive producer is Jason English. Original
music by Alice McCoy with editing help from Mary Do,
Sound design and mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research in fact
checking by me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice act being in
(33:00):
this episode by Robbie Jack. Special thanks to Chris Barker.
Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur and Fineflex Sound Studios. Our
show logo is designed by Lucy Condania. Thanks for listening,
(33:21):
Thank you, Emily. Bye.
This is an I Heart original, so picture this. It's
early January, it's cold and wet. You're cold and wet.
You're in London, close to the Thames, where the narrow
streets are filthy and prone to flooding. You decide to
head to a coffee house for a nice, warm dish
(00:27):
of coffee. Yes it is a dish. You approach the
bar and the woman behind it. A dish of coffee
goes for about a penny, but pennies really, all silver
coins are in short supply these days, so what are
you going to pay with? You plunge your freezing fingers
(00:51):
into your pocket. If you're a woman, this pocket is
a little pouch tied to your waist. And if you're
a man and your fashion forward, it's sewn into your clothes.
But let's be honest, you're definitely a man if you're
going to a coffeehouse, because most ladies weren't permitted. You
pull out a silver penny, an old, busted, handhammered silver
(01:15):
penny made before the restoration of the monarchy, some thirty
odd years prior. You place your penny on the counter nervously.
The coffee house made eyes it suspiciously. She picks it up,
testing the weight in her hand. It's a little bit thin,
the edges look worn. From what she can tell, the
(01:38):
king on it has been dead for more than half
a century. Is she going to accept it? Given where
we are in time, there's a very good chance that
she won't. So why would the coffeehouse maid reject your
busted penny money's money? Right? Well, yes and no, because
(02:02):
right about now, that's a bigger question than you might think,
and it's one that will dictate not only the career
of Isaac Newton, but also William Challoner. For I Heart Radio,
I'm Linda Rodriguez mcrabie and this is Newton's Law and
I Heart Original podcast. You are making episode two, No
(03:04):
Silver Linings, Act one. For what it's worth, the coffee
house made might not take your coin because it's so degraded.
But the fact was, in early most of the coins
being traded throughout the country were degraded. England's currency is
(03:29):
in crisis. You know that if you spent a lot
of time in coffee houses, because these are places where
people talk, and one of the things people were definitely
talking about was the ongoing problems with the coinage, because
the terrible thing when a man cannot poaches a dish
of coffee for want of coin, I blame the mint.
Barely the thin worn coins. Shopkeepers refuse them, and one
(03:54):
can barely discern between counterfeits, and they've justly made. There
are rumors that Parlament men and the Treasury and the
men are all planning to do something about it, but
as yet they haven't. So while everyone holds their breath
and waits for whatever the government decides, the status of
your particular coin hangs in the balance. The coffee housemaid
(04:17):
can decide that your coin is simply too busted and
turn you down, but then that means she's missing out
on a sale, or she can accept a coin that
is possibly worthless, or at least worth less. So say
she does accept your battered coin, maybe against her better instincts,
and you get your dish of coffee. You settle down
(04:39):
at a table. There are a couple of newspapers and
gazettes and pamphlets around, and you listen to the chatter
I have heard. The doctor is Newton is to be
the warden of the mint. Indeed, I do hope you
should have more to do with the affairs of the
mint than the last warden. Okay, what was going on
(05:02):
with the coinage? Well, we are going to get into
that big time because it's the reason for this whole shebang,
but we're going to first put that question on hold.
We're going to start with another question. What actually is
a coin? At its most basic coin is money a
(05:25):
representative way to store value. We can exchange that value
for other things, goods and services. So money is a
medium of exchange, a way to facilitate trade or purchasing.
And from way back in the day, metal was ideal
for this representative exchange function because it was something that
most people agreed had inherent value, It was easily transferable,
(05:48):
it was durable, and it was easily divisible on like
say a cow. Metal coins date back to around six
b C with the Lydians people and what's now to Turkey.
Minting started in Britain in the second century b C
with the various Celtic tribes, and then in a more
regular way with the Romans. There was a mint in
(06:09):
London dating from the third century, but then the Romans
left and London went through a kind of wild adolescence.
But By the time about For the Great, the ninth
century Anglo Saxon ruler who really laid the groundwork for
the unification of England's various sovereign states, there was a
working mint in the city turning out the kingdom's coins.
(06:30):
By the seventeenth century, England's monetary system was based on
a bi metallic standard, high denomination gold coins and lower
denomination silver coins, and the coins derived their value from
the actual weight of the gold or silver they contained.
A penny, for example, was worth a penny because that
(06:50):
was the value of the twenty four grains of silver
it contained. Because unlike today where we have coins and
we we just hand them over, the kinage in the
eighties six nineties relies on its weight in silver to
give it its value. That's Chris Parker, historian at the
Royal Mint. As in the same royal mint that Alfred
the Great started back in the ninth century and the
(07:12):
one that Newton becomes warden of in the seventeenth century,
and that still makes our coins now in the twenty
first century. Anyway, value based on weight seems very logical.
But here's the problem. By the sixteen nineties, many many
of the coins in circulation, like You're busted penny did
not contain the amount of silver their face value promised
(07:35):
they did. So if you had a coin that was
reduced in weight because it had silver removed from it,
it had lost some of its value, and you could
go to a shop and try and buy a shillings
worth of goods with a worn, battered, degraded shilling, the
shopkeeper isn't going to take that shillings value because he
can see it's lost weight. So as a huge problem
from an economic perspective that you're affecting trade. So, yeah,
(07:58):
you're lucky got that coffee, But why wouldn't your penny
contain those twenty four grains of silver? After all? Isn't
it the job of the Royal mint to make sure
that it did well? Yes, but in the six nineties
several long simmering problems had just come to the boil.
(08:18):
First start, many of the coins were so degraded because
the vast majority of those coins were hand hammered. Hand
Hammering was how coins had been made for pretty much
as long as there had been coins. This was an
imprecise process. Coins were never each quite the same. The
engravings were often off center. The edges weren't milled, meaning
they didn't have the finish or the grooves that you
(08:40):
see on modern coins. This irregularity meant that they degraded
or looked degraded more easily, and some people, a lot
of people took advantage of this. The easiest and perhaps
most damaging way people messed with the coinage was clipping.
People would him off a tiny amount of metal around
(09:02):
the edge of the coin, then hammer the coin thinner
to make up the size, and then they'd gather up
all those tiny silver shavings, combine them and melt them
down into bars or ingots and sell those off. This
was free money, and it was easy to get away
with because it was difficult to tell a coin that
was intentionally clipped from one that was just old. Everybody
(09:22):
was degrading the coinage because it was in such a
poor state anyway, and so once you get a majority
of people doing it, it's it sort of takes away
the stigma of doing something illegal, particularly when it's being
done by respected banker's shopkeepers. People were just doing it
on a regular basis. It sounds almost trivial, what's a
(09:44):
little off the edges, But This was a tremendous problem
because again it degraded the actual value of the coin
in your hand. Philosopher John Locke wrote, I do not
see how in a little while we shall have any
money or goods at all in England if clipping be
not immediately stopped. Clipping is a great leak, which for
(10:06):
some time past has contributed more to sink us than
all the forces of our enemies could do. Some Mark
and Newton included even suspected that foreign powers were trimming
English money just to synchronation that much faster. The terrible
state of the hand hammered coins also meant that they
were easier to counterfeit using less valuable materials. You didn't
(10:29):
even have to do a very good job. Well, if
you can imagine what you're trying to counterfeit is nothing
except a very very badly worn blank disc with some
vague images on it that's over a century old. Incredibly
easy because you don't have to be a very good artist,
You don't have to be a very good engraver. You
can knock up some incredibly substandard eyes and you can
put something out there that very easily resembles a batted,
(10:52):
worn shilling sixpence or half crown that was over a
century old. It wasn't that difficult. Counterfeiting and clipping often
went together. Sometimes clippers would melt down all those little
slivers of silver to use in counterfeiting new coins. Clipping
was so widespread that counterfeiters often clipped their own fakes
(11:12):
to make them seem more authentic and counterfeiting well. Counterfeiting
was so rampant that some estimates claimed that one out
of every ten coins in circulation was fake. That was
super bad for people at all levels of English society,
from the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the butcher, baker
and candlestick makers. Not to mention the seventeenth century baristas.
(11:37):
Silver was the lifeblood of the economy. This is what
everyone would have used to pay for daily expenses. If
there wasn't enough of it to go around, or if
what there was was debased and distrusted costs rows astronomically,
economic life ground to a halt. The thing was, it
(11:59):
didn't have to be this way. The Mint had a
solution right there in its workshop. Act two. Msieur Blondeaux
and his marvelous machines. Peter blonde was an engineer at
(12:22):
the Paris Mint when he was noticed by England's Parliament
in sixte How and why he was noticed I don't
know that. The important part is that the Treasury Committee
believed that Blondo had worked on improving the French coin,
specifically with using these new machines to mill, press and
edge coins, and that he could be persuaded to come
(12:47):
to England. This was a year of massive political upheaval.
Charles the First was beheaded by the Parliamentarians, ending the monarchy.
Oliver Cromwell appeared in general ame Lord Protector of the
newly made Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Wales, and he
also canceled Christmas. The change in regime necessitated a change
(13:11):
in coins, after all. In addition to being a medium
of exchange, coins are also an easily disseminated reminder of
who's in charge. Blundo was invited by Parliament's Mint Committee
to demonstrate his milling and edging technique in sixteen fifty.
That year, after showing his very fine pieces to the committee,
(13:32):
Blundo published a pamphlet a bit of propaganda, describing the
benefits of his machinery. A humble representation of Peter Blundo,
followed by another a most humble memorandum from Peter Blunde.
Spoiler alert, these were not humble. Blondo started by pointing
(13:53):
out everything that was wrong with hand hammered coins. The
money coined with emma can not to be made exactly long,
nor equal in weight and bigness, and is often ghostly
marked and have many odds of folds, which gives a
great facility to the false coiners to counterfeit it also
to the clippers to clip it, it being very hard
(14:16):
to discern between eclipped piece in one note clipped. Blondo,
as the Treasury knew, had a better way. Milt coinage
was a German invention dating as far back as fifty
Instead of hammering an image into a blank coin, Milt
coining used a screw press to sink the engraving deep
(14:37):
into the metal. The innovation was brought to France, where
the mechanism was improved and adopted by the engineers at
the Paris meant the machines produced regularly sized and weighted
coins with precise images, which made them more difficult to counterfeit.
But Blondo's edging technique was the real start, allowing him
to put a grooved finish or even a phrase on
(14:58):
the edges. This would make a coin nearly impossible to
clip without detection. Blundo wasn't the first to introduce these
machines to the Royal Mint, however, previous attempts had largely failed,
and you can chalk that up to a few things.
The cost of setting up and running the new machines
was considerable, and they were rumored to break down easily.
There was also the English distrust of anything foreign, especially French.
(15:23):
But perhaps more significantly, there was the fact that the
Company of money Ears, more or less hereditary Union Slash Guild,
had had the exclusive contract with the Mint to produce
the coins for centuries, but in sixteen fifty the New
Commonwealth needed new coins, and the Treasury was willing to
(15:43):
give Blundo a chance. The money Ears for obvious reasons,
We're not It didn't help that Blundo not only wanted
their job and claimed they were rubbish at it, but
he also accused the money Ears of corruption. In his pamphlets.
He alleged that the hammered coin fresh from the Mint
was of disparate weights, and that this was intentional and
(16:06):
it was the poor he said, who suffered for it,
which turns to the great ruin and destruction of commerce
and undoing those poor people who spend their money little
by little. Blondo was essentially accusing the money Ears of
serious corruption, of fraud. This really piste them off, of course,
(16:29):
and they came back with a pamphlet of their own,
a most humble remonstrance for Peter blonde Also not humble.
The moneyers responded that Blondo couldn't do anything that they
couldn't already do, branded him a liar, and slammed him
for daring to claim that the money they made was
ill favoredly coined. Blondo, they said, not only maligned the
(16:52):
good name of the company of money Ears, but also
most falsely to imprint in the hearts and minds of
all people in Christendom, and more especially the good people
under the obedience of the Parliament of England, that the
monies of this Commonwealth are not justly made. Blondeau was
undermining not only English confidence in the currency, but global
(17:15):
confidence in it as well with his force and scandalous libels.
In sixteen fifty one, the Treasury decided to settle the
matter with a competition a money off. Treasury officials said, fine,
each of you design and make a half crown, a
shilling and sixpence coin, and we'll see which ones are better.
(17:37):
David Rammage, the provost of the moneyers, was their champion.
Provost was an elected position, meaning that Rammage was a
man of some reputation and power. And now in the
Great money Off of sixty one, this reputation and the
reputation of the company and its contract with the Mint
was on the line. I mustn't file damn that frenchman's
(18:00):
block ready set money make Brammage made the coins in
the way that they always had, Using a hammer in
his own hands, he placed the plan, set the blank
coin on the anvil die to get the alignment perfect.
(18:28):
Holding the top die in place, he swung the hammer,
bringing it down on the die and stamping the image
into the metal. One done, h two oh three. Blundo
and his team meanwhile got his machines rolling one two, three,
(18:54):
ten seconds remaining. I. By the end of the allotted time,
(19:14):
Rammont had made twelve coins, twelve coins that were a
bit wonky, that didn't quite look all the same, twelve
coins that looked like most of the money passed throughout
the Kingdom, which is to say not great. Blondo meanwhile
made three hundred coins, three hundred perfectly weighted, regularly sized
(19:36):
coins of impeccable quality and design, complete with a lettered
edge that no clipper could clip. On the half crown piece,
it read truth in Peace Ste Peter Blonde's inventor facet
That's Latin for he made congratulations to Mont Senior Blondo
and his marvelous machines. Ram failed Blundo one. But despite
(20:05):
the fact that Blondo's machines were clearly superior, the treasury
passed on them. They just couldn't afford it. After all,
it takes money to make money. But then a stroke
of luck, the English fleet captured a load of Spanish
treasure at the Battle of Cadiz in sixteen fifty six,
and suddenly the Commonwealth was able to pay for Blondo
(20:27):
and his machines. But then Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell's death
in sixteen fifty eight more or less ended the protector
at experiment, and it left Blundo without well a protector.
He shipped his machinery off to Edinburgh and himself back
to France, and he would have stayed there too, had
it not been for the terrible quality of the coins
(20:49):
minted for the restoration. King Charles the second Blundo was
invited back in sixteen sixty two, and this time given
a twenty one year contract. The money ears might even
have gotten to keep their jobs too, because these machines
still needed skilled men to run them. So the monarchy's
back blunders back and Christmass back to Huzza. Things should
(21:11):
have been good, right whoa not so much? Act three
Fighting the Silver Bullet. In sixteen sixty three, Samuel Peeps,
(21:34):
the famous diary writer, a guy who was everywhere in
the seventeenth century, toured the mince facilities. This was just
after Blundo set up shop. Some of the machines were
meant to be secret, but Peeps was a man who
knows some people. He later becomes one of Newton's closest friends.
We were sharing this method of making new money from
the beginning to the end, which is so pretty. They
(21:58):
say that this way is more charged to the king
in the old way, but it is meter freeer from
clipping or counterfeiting. The putting of the words upon the
edge is not to be done without an engine of
the charge, and noise that no counterfeit will venture upon,
and it employs as many men as the old and
speedy for the next thirty years. The Mint used these
machines to make the coins when they made the coins,
(22:20):
which wasn't an all the time kind of thing. If
you want a sense of what made Peep so giddy,
listen to Chris Barker describe how they worked. The Mint
will get the raw bullion coming in and then they
will melt down the gold and silver and they will
cast them out into thin strips to get them to
(22:41):
the correct thickness for coining. The next part of the
processes you put them through a machinery which actually blanks them.
So you're getting the blank discs out of that strip
of metal, and they'll be weighed to make sure that
the correct weight, and then you've got a sufficient blank
and ready for processing. You will end up striking the
(23:02):
coin using something called screw press, a ginormous t shape.
The blank was sandwiched between the dyes which carried the images.
One was on the end of the tea and one
was on the anvil. Two strong men would turn the
screw press, wishing the blank in between the person you're
(23:23):
gonna reserve your sympathy for as a gentleman who's doing
the putting the blanks on and flicking the finished coin
all or off, because they've had their fingers crushed repeatedly
by having several tons descend on them as they're trying
to put blanks and flicked finished coins off. Finally you
get a finished coin after that striking process. The smaller
(23:50):
coins had a milled grooved edge, and the larger coins
had a phrase decks at tutaman, which was Latin for
a decoration and a safeguard. Fun fact, this phrase was
on the coins until two thousand seventeen when the new
pound coin was introduced and the machines did do what
Blondo promised they would. It was harder to clip a
(24:12):
machine mild coin, and it was harder to counterfeit them,
and yet clipping and counterfeiting persisted. In fact, they got worse.
Why because the Treasury never recalled the old hand hammered coins. Honestly,
it is exactly like the scene in foulter Geist when
Craig T. Nelson is all, you moved the cemetery, but
(24:34):
you left the bodies, didn't you. And just like in
foulter geist. The old coins caused all kinds of problems.
This basically left two sets of coinage in the country,
the good new machine mild coins and the bad old
hand hammered coins, and both were legal tender. Silver was
still being clipped off the old coins and much the
(24:56):
time leaving the country to be sold elsewhere. Counter Fit
coins flourished because your basic coiners could still do a
brisk business knocking out messy hand hammered coins. Meanwhile, some
clever if you like William Chaloner had figured out how
to fake these supposedly unfakeable coins. Compounding the problem. People merchants,
(25:17):
especially tended to hoard the good coins. Chris Barker, You've
got these brand new, lovely regular coins. What are you
going to do. If you're a normal individual who sees
these coming into coming into them through the banks and
through their change. You're not going to use and spend
those brand new coins. You're going to hold them because
(25:38):
you know they have a good value. So if you're
slightly and scrupulous, what you'll do is you melt down
the good coins because you know exactly the way, you
know exactly the fineness. You can create bullion, which you
can then sell onto the continent as a profit. The
price of silver had recently gone up in some markets,
meaning that silver was worth more as buoy on the
(25:59):
raw metal basically in continental Europe than it was as
face value coins in England. This is what's called arbitrage,
which is basically exploiting the difference in price commodities fetch
in different markets for a profit. So English silver is
being sold for continental gold, leaving only the bad, old,
degraded coins in the hands of the people, and by
(26:22):
the sixteen nineties it was estimated that only one out
of every two hundred coins was a machine milled coin.
The rest were old and busted and below weight or
just straight up fake. What all of this added up
to the clipping the counterfeiting the arbitrage markets was that
there was a serious shortage of silver, and the longer
(26:44):
the old coins stayed in circulation, the longer clippers and
coiners stayed in operation, and the supply of silver coins
perpetually shrank. By now, the stock of real silver coins
from the pennies to the crowns had dwindled almost to
the point of extinct. That might explain why the coffee
has made took your penny. She didn't know when she'd
(27:04):
see another. The situation became more problematic after the so
called Glorious Revolution of which removed the Catholic King James
the Second from the throne and put his Protestant daughter
Mary and her husband, the Dutch Prince William of Orange
on it. The new regime needed new coins. These are
(27:27):
a representation of royal authority and royal power even back then.
Still for a lot of people in rural area, is
the only sort of representation that they would have of
the monarchy. You want to have this image of authority
coming across by your coinage, not you don't. You don't
want to be represented at home and abroad by a
coinage that is it's such poor condition that you can
(27:50):
barely stand musta. But it wasn't just about how things
looked again, the coin is the representation of the monarch.
If it's busted, folks might start one, or if the
monarchy is busted too. If you go boil it back
down to the basics, think about what a coin is
and why we actually have any designs on a coin
at all. The design is on there to show that
(28:11):
this piece of metal, this this piece of silver is
of a given value, in a given weight, and as
royal approval. You know it's got the seal of Royalty
on it. Therefore you know you can trust it, and
you know you can accept it. And this gets us
to the heart of what a currency really is. Trust.
It's an agreement at this moment in history, it's an
(28:32):
agreement that this shilling weighs this amount of silver because
the king or queen really Parliament says it does. The
marks on the coins were a shorthand for the value
they represented, but also represented the authority that guaranteed that value.
So if the people don't trust the currency, if the
people can't agree that this penny is worth a dish
(28:53):
of coffee, then the people have a problem and the
government has an even bigger problem. This is also why
the punishment for counterfeiting or clipping was so severe, public
disemboweling and head on a spike severe. These were socially
and economically destabilizing crimes that hacked at the authority of
the government. In William Lowndes, the Secretary of the Treasury,
(29:20):
wrote to the country's brightest thinkers to ask them what
to do, including Isaac Newton, who was still lecturing to
the walls up in Cambridge. Economics as a discipline hadn't
really been invented yet, so Lowndes was casting his net
pretty wide for solutions. Newton, like pretty much everyone else,
had the same answer. Recall all the old bad coins,
(29:43):
make them no longer legal tender, and remnt them duh.
Newton also suggested that the Treasury make the intrinsic and
extrinsic values of the money the same. The intrinsic value
of the coin was its value on the market. The
extrinsic was the face you. By making those the same
and reducing the silver content and devaluing the currency in
(30:05):
the short term, it would keep people from being able
to make money off melting it down and selling it
in another market. The Parliament didn't agree to that kind
of currency manipulation, although they probably should have. You go
too far, Newton too far? Anyway, it shouldn't have taken Newton, philosopher,
John Locke, architects or Christopher Wren, East India Company governor,
(30:28):
Sir Josiah Child, and a bunch of other prominent people
to convince Parliament, but it sort of did. In late
Parliament finally agreed. So gone are all these medieval thin pieces,
and we've instead of replaced with you know, shiny, new thick,
machine struck coins that look magnificent. That's that's what they
(30:50):
decided to go for with the great recoinage of It
was going to be expensive, very expensive, because of how
degraded the coinage was. It would take three old coins
to make two new coins. The treasury would need to
make up that lost silver from somewhere, and it's not
like England had a ton of silver mines kicking around.
(31:12):
Not to mention, England was also broke, like invent the
national debt broke, but more on that later. In addition
to fighting an expensive war with France, one of the
knock on effects of the silver shortage was that people
tended to pay their taxes in bad coin. This meant
that the treasury was being shorted, taking in coin that
didn't weigh as much as its face value said it did,
(31:33):
and therefore wasn't worth as much. But the recoinage was
the only way to stop the loss of silver from
the country. Confound the coiners and clippers, William Shalloner among them,
and shore up the country's fledgling financial institutions. Parliament passed
the Recoinage Act on January and the melting commenced the
(31:55):
very next day. But if anyone thought that this whole
thing was going to be easy, and based on the
way Newton was offered the Warden Gig, at least some
people did well. Nothing considerable coined of the new and
now only current stamp. Of course, such a scarcity that
(32:18):
tumults are everyday feared. Join me next time on Newton's
Law to find out exactly how Isaac Newton, that prickly
genius saved England. Basically. Newton's Law is a production of
I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me Linda
(32:39):
Rodriguez mccrobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer
is Emily Marinoff. Our executive producer is Jason English. Original
music by Alice McCoy with editing help from Mary Do,
Sound design and mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research in fact
checking by me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice act being in
(33:00):
this episode by Robbie Jack. Special thanks to Chris Barker.
Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur and Fineflex Sound Studios. Our
show logo is designed by Lucy Condania. Thanks for listening,
(33:21):
Thank you, Emily. Bye.
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