September 1, 2021 • 26 mins
The Great Recoinage was supposed to fix England’s currency problem. But the Mint is bungling the job, and the country is reeling. As Isaac Newton steps into his new role, he applies his scientific process to the Mint’s production line. Silver starts flowing again - but did Newton’s calculations take into account the cleverness of William Chaloner?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is an I heart original in William Chaloner, now
the best counterfeiter in London, living in a fine house
in suburban Knightsbridge, wearing the clothes of a gentleman, inserted
himself into the debate around the coins. This was less
(00:27):
than two years before Parliament passed three Coinage Act and
Challenger's name appeared on a pamphlet entitled Proposals Humbly offered
for an Act to prevent clipping and counterfeiting money. Everybody's
always so humble mm hmm. Now England hath been more
(00:53):
grieved with clipped and counterfeit money than any other country,
for want of proper laws to prevent the same, and
by the abuse of the mintors of our money, who
have made the coin with so little art and ingenuity,
that any may clip or counterfeit money without much difficulty,
(01:15):
that it may be presumed the old money in this
kingdom is now worth two thirds of the intrinsic value.
But if there be not a stop put to clipping
of money, it will in a few years be so
diminished and counterfeited that it will not be worth half
the value it was coined for. Challoner was some forty
(01:41):
years later sounding a lot like Monsieur Blonde, And of
course he wasn't wrong about the coins, because not much
had changed since the sixteen fifties, despite the introduction of
the machines. Remember, the Treasury never recalled all the old coins. Now,
we know that Challoner was more qualified and most to
talk about clipping and counterfeiting, But why would he start
(02:04):
offering tips on how to put himself out of business?
Was chunder going legit using his ill gotten knowledge for
the betterment of the kingdom. Not quite. This was something
bigger than making fake coins and sneakier. Now, the money
being such bad workmanship every smith, clockmaker, brazier, goldsmith, et cetera,
(02:29):
and grave stamps, and the work being so flat and
irregular they can stamp money with a hammer of three
pound weight, which is a great grievance to the Kingdom
to have our money coins so disingenuously that it may
be counterfeited with so much ease. This was a good suggestion,
so good that the Mint was pretty much already in
(02:50):
possession of such a machine. However, Chaloner also added, like
everyone else, that the Treasury needed to recall all the
old coins, melt them down and re mint them. Chaloner
also made a few other suggestions, some practical and some
us so. For example, he proposed that the Mint go
(03:11):
on the road, travel from county to county, to allow
the rich and the poor like to trade in their
coins without fear of being robbed or missing out. Parliament
was not going to go for any of it, really,
after all, who was this William Chaloner anyway is the
son of a Warwickshire weaver. But Chaloner didn't care whether
(03:32):
his suggestions were actually adopted. What Chaloner wanted was to
be noticed. It was just possible, or just becoming possible,
for smart people with things to say to get attention
from powerful people through the new medium of the press.
Have you read the ideas of this chileon? Yes, I
(03:53):
am immensely interested in his proposals. Maybe we should put
them to the test. I would be going to speak
doing further on the subject. A moveablement would be too
great a charge to the King and treasure. But we
must do something about the counterfeits. Indeed, Mrs William Chaloner
(04:13):
speaks since and there's schools at the mint. Having the
merest idea of how they curved the clippup and coins
will sink us All Challenger and figured out that he
could use pamphlets as a way to manufacture himself a
reputation as an expert, to make a name for himself
(04:33):
not only among the criminal classes, and this he thought
could get him what he really wanted and in at
the Mint, a way to waltz through the front door
and get a close up look at its operations. Challoner
summed up his proposal by offering to show Parliament some
exemplary pieces of coin my own design, to demonstrate how
(04:57):
money can be coined so that it shall be impossible
wolf for any private person to counterfeit it. And he
offered to do it at the Mint for I Heart Radio.
I'm Linda Rodriguez mccrabbie and this is Newton's Law and
I Heart original podcast Episode three. Mint Condition you are
(05:26):
making Act one. They're not so great re Coinage. William
(06:03):
Challoner's proposals didn't get him into the Mint yet, but
his recommendation to recall and recoin, now that was something
everyone knew had to be done, and by late Parliament
knew it too. The Great Recoinage, as it was later called,
started on January and it was meant to be wrapped
(06:26):
up in a few months. Most of the time, the
mints were seasonal. If that the men who worked at
them tended to be farm laborers who were called up
for duty when the mint decided it needed new coins. This, however,
was an all hands on deck situation in order to
meet the demands of the incredibly ambitious, certainly foolish schedule
(06:48):
imposed by Parliament. Work at the mint started at four
am and didn't stop until midnight every day except Sunday.
But if you're a picture during a tidy assembly line
style operation, don't Yes, it's not a modern manufacturing process
as we understand it today, so don't think of a um,
(07:08):
you know, production line process where you might start at
one end of the mint and neatly work your way around.
That's Chris Barker, historian at the modern Royal Mint. It's
a very hiddle dey piddled arrangement. So you may well
have melting at one end and then you move your
casted strip down to another end of the mint, so
it's a little bit here, there and everywhere. And this
(07:29):
was on machines that were now more than thirty years old,
in a workshop that had been in use since the
thirteenth century, and all of that manufacturing took place in
the town. So if you can imagine the situation you
would you would have if you were a visit to, say,
walking into the raw Mint in the Tower of London,
you'd walk into a very narrow, cramped, confined alley way
which is flanked on either side by wooden buildings, many
(07:51):
even sort of crazed with age, often falling to pieces,
and you've got to count them literally propped up with
timber and sort of bolted together with big eye bolts
and fall into parts. It's very ramshackle institution. Um by
this point in history, nearly three d workmen, nine presses,
and ten million machines, as well as the three large
(08:12):
furnaces were crammed into this ramshackle institution, which was not
more than a hundred feet at its widest, and that's
not even counting the horses. Some of the rolling machines,
which flattened the sheets of metal to the right thickness
to be punched into blanks, relied on horsepower to turn
their incredible weight. There could be as many as twelve
horses in the workshop at any given moment. Over the
(08:35):
roughly two years of the recoinage, the Mint spent nearly
seven hundred pounds as an actual money in hauling manure
away that's a hundred and thirty five thousand pounds in
today's money. That was at the Tower Mint, the maintment
in the country. But to facilitate bringing in old coins
(08:56):
in places far from London and to up production on
making new ones, the Mint had established temporary operations in Bristol, Chester, Exeter,
Norwich and York, but none of it the long days.
The horse manure of the temporary mints was enough. Things
were not going well at all to begin with. The
(09:19):
man in charge of the recoinage was a guy called
Thomas Neil. He was known as Golden Neil after his
extremely advantageous match to England's richest widow, a woman with
an estate valued at a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
Neil was the Master of the Mint, one of the
three officers along with the warden and the Controller who
(09:40):
ran the Mint. But he was meant to be the
one making this huge undertaking happen, and Neil was, in
a word, useless. It's a recoinage is not doing well
at all. It must be somebody else's fault. Neil was
one of those rich guys who just kept failing upwards
with the help of his powerful contacts. He was the
(10:02):
groom of the bed chamber for Charles the Second, James
the Second, and William the Third, a role that basically
meant that he helped the king, whichever one it was,
get dressed and referee as card games. He'd been Master
of the Mint since six eighties six, but he was
a terrible administrator who had done very little to plan
for the recoinage. Neil was not a good Master of
(10:24):
the Mint. I mean he was not involved in in
then any you know, in a day to day basis.
He's the man who ran up ginormous debts and was
not really concerned generally from from the Mint point of view.
So it was his assistant, the Deputy Master, a French
Hugueno called Dr John Francis Faquier, who did the business
and stuff while Neil did other things. Ran the North
(10:47):
American Postal Service, or rather had a deputy who actually
lived in the colonies do it. Speculated on housing developments
Neil Street. That has a nice ring to it. Trying
to invent cheap proof dice, raised shipwrecks, stuff like that.
Who the fun I leave it to you? You consorted right.
(11:10):
Facua did his best, But there weren't enough men, and
the machines were all old, and there weren't enough of
them either. The mints were not producing coin quickly enough
to meet demand, and the country was in actual danger
of running out of legal physical money. This problem was
compounded by the fact that the mechanism of the government
put in place for allowing people to trade in their
(11:31):
old coins for new ones was not so good. They say,
for a given period of time, we will take coins
at their face value, regardless of how badly worn or
degreat they are. So if you present something that you
can see is a shilling but has lost half its weight,
and it's you know, batted and barely legible, the official
(11:52):
will still take it a shillings value, even though there's
only half a shilling's worth of silver there. But this
system was somewhat narrow. Only people who paid direct taxes
or made loans to the government were allowed to trade
cliped or debased money in for face value. The trade
in also only lasted five months, and that means that
those are in the know, those in the urban areas
(12:12):
who can really get onto this can make a huge
profit because you can gather a selection of very battered
coins which only have minimal silver value, tender them in
and actually get the full face value for them. The
people that suffer are those in the isolated areas, those
who are more remote and more rural, who cannot get
(12:34):
all this old coinage that they might have available to
the exchange in time in order to benefit from this,
because after a certain time you don't get that full
face value. Instead you just left with the weight of
the coinage. Within six months people had to sell their
old coins at weight, meaning that their coins had suddenly
(12:54):
lost as much as half of their value. By this time,
there wasn't enough re legal coin in circulation to pay
for the expenses of daily life. Here's writer John Evelyn's
diary entry from May. Money still continuing exceeding scarce, so
(13:16):
the done was paid or received, but all was on trust,
the mint not supplying for common necessities. Things were still
bad a month later. Want of current money to carry
on the smallest concerns even for daily provisions in the
markets guineas lowered to twenty two shillings and great sums
(13:37):
daily transported to Holland, where at yields more with other
treasures sent to pay the armies. And so imprudent was
the late Parliament to condemn the old though clipped and
corrupted till they had provided supplies to this at the
fraud of the bankers and goldsmiths, who, having gotten immense
riches by extortion, keep up their treasure in expectation of
(14:01):
enhancing its value. The mint, Underneil's very hands off leadership,
was floundering. Nothing considerable coined of the new and now
only current stamp. Of course, such a scarcity that tumults
every day feed that there wasn't enough coin was bad
for wealthier people like John Evelyn, but again it was
(14:23):
much worse for the poor. Another contemporary observer wrote in
a private letter that the people are discontented to the utmost,
adding that many self murders were happening owing to the want,
and it was starting to look pretty bleak for the
government as well. For one thing, the want that drove
(14:46):
people to kill themselves might just as easily drive them
to rage and riot. These were and are the conditions
that lead to revolution, and in fact, at least one
town saw people arrested for rioting after attack. Collector refused
to take the old coins, but what else were they
going to pay with? And that's the other thing. When
(15:08):
the people can't pay rent or taxes, the government's coffers
start to empty. This government was already in trouble, so
the sudden lack of revenue made things that much worse.
Soldiers in some parts of the country were being paid
in provisions because there wasn't enough coin to pay them
in real money. Mutinous grumblings added to the tumult, and
(15:28):
everyone started squinting at the King and Queen suspiciously. If
Isaac Newton had wanted an easy gig, he had become
Warden of the Royal Mint at exactly the wrong time
(15:55):
Act two. Out with the Old in with the Newton.
To put it diccinctly, the Mint was a shambles, a
mess that was threatening to undermine the economy, the new monarchy,
the country's fragile financial institutions, everything. And when he was
confronted with this mess, Warden Isaac Newton didn't do what
(16:19):
Master Neil had done, and he didn't do what every
other warden had done, which was basically nothing. A Newson
could have done that. But Newson was not that sort
of puss. That's Dr Patricia Farah, Cambridge historian and Newton expert.
He went in the very energetically and decided he was
going to overhaul the system and make it work properly.
(16:40):
And he was a very very dedicated, systematic, organized manager.
Newton rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He was,
as one biographer later said, a born administrator. Thomas Fowl,
a clerk at the Mint, actually wrote to Newton to
tell him that he was the first wordens since at
least sixteen seventy two who didn't treat the post as
(17:04):
a signic cure. If I may be so bold to say,
we shall find you fair to exceed the rest for
the gooden privileges of the Mint, more than all your predecessors.
Foul also spent the majority of this letter explaining all
the ways that the previous wardens had disappointed. Sir Anthonys
and Ledger, then warden of the Mint, came very seldom
(17:26):
to the place, and did not anything of service more
than to come and ask how the affairs of the
Mint were, And that was all, and so went his
way foul might have been trying to get on Newton's
good side, certainly, but Charles Montague, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer who gave Newton the job, later said that the
recoinage couldn't have happened without him. Nietzsan was absolutely meticulous
(17:50):
in everything that he did. He was a very thorough man.
It seems that all the energy he put into making
observations of the stars or holding the dates of ancient
events that happened thousands of years ago, he turned all
that energy into making sure that the mint was rung
as efficiently as the microscope had only really just been invented,
(18:14):
but Newton was putting the mints operations under it. Metaphorically speaking.
Newton researched the history of the mint going back two
hundred years. He went through decades of accounting books, making
notes in the margins. He was an obsessive copier. He
could have had his assistance copied down all the meeting notes,
(18:36):
all his letters and correspondence with the Treasury and others,
but he did it himself. Haines, bring the records. I
want all the receipts and accounting books and the warrants.
This meant that Newton was aware of all the mints business,
so much so that he knew who was trying to
get one over on the Mint, as the Treasury already
paid the cop For example, he told the Treasury not
(18:59):
to pay the carpenters until the quality of their work
was checked. We are humbly off opinion that the work
done by the carpenter and the rest of the workman
ought to be surveyed and valued before their whole bills
are paid off. Another time, he kept the Mint from
signing a contract with some metal dealers who had offered
(19:19):
to take over the recoinage at a very steep markup.
These goldsmiths want how much preposterous? From my observations, the
Mint can do for at least a third less than
these Charlatan's propose. Golden Neil has made a mess of
this mood that he was spending his wife's money and
not the Treasury. Is within a month and a half
(19:40):
on the job, Newton had shouldered useless Neil out of
the way and was basically doing his job too. We
are in the business of making money, not spending it needlessly.
Newton knew that in order for the Mint to meet
the demands of the Treasury. Some things, a lot of
things had to change. If you can keep reason above passion,
(20:02):
that and watchfulness will be your best defendants. Newton saw
that the machines were producing a maximum of fifteen thousand
pounds of coin a week. The treasury wanted thirty pounds
of coin a week. This was a mass problem. Newton
(20:24):
calculated that he'd need two new smelting furnaces, eight new
rolling mills, and five new coining presses. This sort of
empirical data collection, this was what Newton was really really
good at. For example, as Thomas Levinson noted in his
book Newton in the Counterfeiter, Newton realized that a new
(20:44):
melting pot could hold eight hundred pounds of silver metal,
but within six weeks that capacity was reduced to just
six and fifty pounds because the pot actually got smaller
as the silver codd it. This effected the output and
the number of coins that could be produced, so Newton
determined that a part was only good for about a
hundred and twenty meltings. Newton cast his eye around the
(21:06):
workshop looking for more inefficiencies. There is also a waste
in the milling by the dripping off off the sand
with some particles of silver, and by some blanks falling
out of the pan upon the half and shreds of
silver lost in the dust, or by sticking to the
workman's shoes. Then he turned to the men themselves. One
(21:29):
of the things that he did was to institute what
we would call time and motion studies, and he watched
all the people working, and he insisted that they should
work far, far faster to make the work more efficient.
Newton calculated the rate at which mint workers could turn
out coins. Two mills with four millers, twelve horses, two horsekeepers,
(21:53):
three cutters, two flatters, eight sizes, one kneeler, three blanches,
too markers to press his with fourteen laborers to pull
at them, can coin three thousand pounds up money per diam.
Newton said, the men operating the press needed to produce
fifty to fifty five coins a minute in order to
make three thou pounds of coin a day. That's almost
(22:16):
a coin every second. That's fast. It is physically demanding.
And the four gentlemen who are pulling on the on
the ropes as part of the screw press, and there's
the demands as such that they can only operate in
shifts of fifteen minutes before they're exhausted. So they're doing
fifteen minutes on they'll swap out. Four more people come
in fifteen minutes, and so they're constantly swapping in and out.
(22:42):
This does not make Newton popular with his new staff. Unsurprisingly,
all the staff disliked him because he made the work
at a far higher rate, since he got rid of
all the little private practices where people were making money
on the site. So he was a very very efficient manager.
He was also a ruthless manage I don't think Newton
(23:02):
was particularly well liked at all, if I'm honest. I
mean there are there are accounts of people who get
on with him. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't. He
was not disliked by everybody, but there was also a
lot of people he rubbed up the wrong way. I
think he's probably one of those individuals where if he
took a disliking to you, that was it. No matter
what you did, no matter what you could do, you've
had it. Newton's efforts and indifference to the opinions of
(23:26):
his staff paid off. Between sixteen ninety six and seventeen hundred,
The value of the silver struck by the Mint was
more than five point one million pounds. That was about
two million pounds more than had been made in the
previous thirty five years put together, and more importantly, by
(23:46):
September sixteen ninety six, silver coin was again flowing through
the veins of the country's economy. There were no major riots,
no revolution, and both the King and Queen kept their heads.
Newton thought he deserved a raise, or at least as
much as Neil was getting, for being master. The salary
(24:06):
of the warden of his Majesty's Mint is only four
pound per annum, with a house where forty pound per annum,
and his purposes are only three pound twelve shillings per
annum for call, all which taxes being deducted. Is so
small in respect of the salaries and purposes of the
other officers of the Mint, as suffices not to support
(24:29):
the authority of his office. It seems that Newton got
that raise, But there was still another problem facing the Mint,
and this one wasn't something Newton could solve through a
time and motion study. This was a problem that would,
at least for a while, consume the majority of Newton's
time as warden bringing clippers and counterfeiters to justice, and
(24:53):
it was a part of Newton's job that he was
not happy about at all. Nor is there any reward
or encouragement appointing for my service in these matters? Nor
am I provided with any competent assistance to enable me
to grapple with an undertaking soul vac sastious and dangerous?
(25:14):
Is this coming up on Newton's Law? We know by
now that this most vexatious counterfeiter, William Chaloner, is no
run of the mill coiner, So how will his play
for the mint itself turn out? The Mint is either
incompetent or corrupt or both. Newton's Law is a production
(25:40):
of I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me
Linda Rodriguez McRobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our
producer is Emily Marina. 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
(26:00):
checking by me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice acting by Keith Fleming,
Mark McDonald and Robert Jack. Special thanks to Chris Barker
and Dr Patricia Farrell. Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur and
Fineflex Sound Studios. Our show logo is designed by Lucy Continia.
Thanks for listening, Bloodio
This is an I heart original in William Chaloner, now
the best counterfeiter in London, living in a fine house
in suburban Knightsbridge, wearing the clothes of a gentleman, inserted
himself into the debate around the coins. This was less
(00:27):
than two years before Parliament passed three Coinage Act and
Challenger's name appeared on a pamphlet entitled Proposals Humbly offered
for an Act to prevent clipping and counterfeiting money. Everybody's
always so humble mm hmm. Now England hath been more
(00:53):
grieved with clipped and counterfeit money than any other country,
for want of proper laws to prevent the same, and
by the abuse of the mintors of our money, who
have made the coin with so little art and ingenuity,
that any may clip or counterfeit money without much difficulty,
(01:15):
that it may be presumed the old money in this
kingdom is now worth two thirds of the intrinsic value.
But if there be not a stop put to clipping
of money, it will in a few years be so
diminished and counterfeited that it will not be worth half
the value it was coined for. Challoner was some forty
(01:41):
years later sounding a lot like Monsieur Blonde, And of
course he wasn't wrong about the coins, because not much
had changed since the sixteen fifties, despite the introduction of
the machines. Remember, the Treasury never recalled all the old coins. Now,
we know that Challoner was more qualified and most to
talk about clipping and counterfeiting, But why would he start
(02:04):
offering tips on how to put himself out of business?
Was chunder going legit using his ill gotten knowledge for
the betterment of the kingdom. Not quite. This was something
bigger than making fake coins and sneakier. Now, the money
being such bad workmanship every smith, clockmaker, brazier, goldsmith, et cetera,
(02:29):
and grave stamps, and the work being so flat and
irregular they can stamp money with a hammer of three
pound weight, which is a great grievance to the Kingdom
to have our money coins so disingenuously that it may
be counterfeited with so much ease. This was a good suggestion,
so good that the Mint was pretty much already in
(02:50):
possession of such a machine. However, Chaloner also added, like
everyone else, that the Treasury needed to recall all the
old coins, melt them down and re mint them. Chaloner
also made a few other suggestions, some practical and some
us so. For example, he proposed that the Mint go
(03:11):
on the road, travel from county to county, to allow
the rich and the poor like to trade in their
coins without fear of being robbed or missing out. Parliament
was not going to go for any of it, really,
after all, who was this William Chaloner anyway is the
son of a Warwickshire weaver. But Chaloner didn't care whether
(03:32):
his suggestions were actually adopted. What Chaloner wanted was to
be noticed. It was just possible, or just becoming possible,
for smart people with things to say to get attention
from powerful people through the new medium of the press.
Have you read the ideas of this chileon? Yes, I
(03:53):
am immensely interested in his proposals. Maybe we should put
them to the test. I would be going to speak
doing further on the subject. A moveablement would be too
great a charge to the King and treasure. But we
must do something about the counterfeits. Indeed, Mrs William Chaloner
(04:13):
speaks since and there's schools at the mint. Having the
merest idea of how they curved the clippup and coins
will sink us All Challenger and figured out that he
could use pamphlets as a way to manufacture himself a
reputation as an expert, to make a name for himself
(04:33):
not only among the criminal classes, and this he thought
could get him what he really wanted and in at
the Mint, a way to waltz through the front door
and get a close up look at its operations. Challoner
summed up his proposal by offering to show Parliament some
exemplary pieces of coin my own design, to demonstrate how
(04:57):
money can be coined so that it shall be impossible
wolf for any private person to counterfeit it. And he
offered to do it at the Mint for I Heart Radio.
I'm Linda Rodriguez mccrabbie and this is Newton's Law and
I Heart original podcast Episode three. Mint Condition you are
(05:26):
making Act one. They're not so great re Coinage. William
(06:03):
Challoner's proposals didn't get him into the Mint yet, but
his recommendation to recall and recoin, now that was something
everyone knew had to be done, and by late Parliament
knew it too. The Great Recoinage, as it was later called,
started on January and it was meant to be wrapped
(06:26):
up in a few months. Most of the time, the
mints were seasonal. If that the men who worked at
them tended to be farm laborers who were called up
for duty when the mint decided it needed new coins. This, however,
was an all hands on deck situation in order to
meet the demands of the incredibly ambitious, certainly foolish schedule
(06:48):
imposed by Parliament. Work at the mint started at four
am and didn't stop until midnight every day except Sunday.
But if you're a picture during a tidy assembly line
style operation, don't Yes, it's not a modern manufacturing process
as we understand it today, so don't think of a um,
(07:08):
you know, production line process where you might start at
one end of the mint and neatly work your way around.
That's Chris Barker, historian at the modern Royal Mint. It's
a very hiddle dey piddled arrangement. So you may well
have melting at one end and then you move your
casted strip down to another end of the mint, so
it's a little bit here, there and everywhere. And this
(07:29):
was on machines that were now more than thirty years old,
in a workshop that had been in use since the
thirteenth century, and all of that manufacturing took place in
the town. So if you can imagine the situation you
would you would have if you were a visit to, say,
walking into the raw Mint in the Tower of London,
you'd walk into a very narrow, cramped, confined alley way
which is flanked on either side by wooden buildings, many
(07:51):
even sort of crazed with age, often falling to pieces,
and you've got to count them literally propped up with
timber and sort of bolted together with big eye bolts
and fall into parts. It's very ramshackle institution. Um by
this point in history, nearly three d workmen, nine presses,
and ten million machines, as well as the three large
(08:12):
furnaces were crammed into this ramshackle institution, which was not
more than a hundred feet at its widest, and that's
not even counting the horses. Some of the rolling machines,
which flattened the sheets of metal to the right thickness
to be punched into blanks, relied on horsepower to turn
their incredible weight. There could be as many as twelve
horses in the workshop at any given moment. Over the
(08:35):
roughly two years of the recoinage, the Mint spent nearly
seven hundred pounds as an actual money in hauling manure
away that's a hundred and thirty five thousand pounds in
today's money. That was at the Tower Mint, the maintment
in the country. But to facilitate bringing in old coins
(08:56):
in places far from London and to up production on
making new ones, the Mint had established temporary operations in Bristol, Chester, Exeter,
Norwich and York, but none of it the long days.
The horse manure of the temporary mints was enough. Things
were not going well at all to begin with. The
(09:19):
man in charge of the recoinage was a guy called
Thomas Neil. He was known as Golden Neil after his
extremely advantageous match to England's richest widow, a woman with
an estate valued at a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
Neil was the Master of the Mint, one of the
three officers along with the warden and the Controller who
(09:40):
ran the Mint. But he was meant to be the
one making this huge undertaking happen, and Neil was, in
a word, useless. It's a recoinage is not doing well
at all. It must be somebody else's fault. Neil was
one of those rich guys who just kept failing upwards
with the help of his powerful contacts. He was the
(10:02):
groom of the bed chamber for Charles the Second, James
the Second, and William the Third, a role that basically
meant that he helped the king, whichever one it was,
get dressed and referee as card games. He'd been Master
of the Mint since six eighties six, but he was
a terrible administrator who had done very little to plan
for the recoinage. Neil was not a good Master of
(10:24):
the Mint. I mean he was not involved in in
then any you know, in a day to day basis.
He's the man who ran up ginormous debts and was
not really concerned generally from from the Mint point of view.
So it was his assistant, the Deputy Master, a French
Hugueno called Dr John Francis Faquier, who did the business
and stuff while Neil did other things. Ran the North
(10:47):
American Postal Service, or rather had a deputy who actually
lived in the colonies do it. Speculated on housing developments
Neil Street. That has a nice ring to it. Trying
to invent cheap proof dice, raised shipwrecks, stuff like that.
Who the fun I leave it to you? You consorted right.
(11:10):
Facua did his best, But there weren't enough men, and
the machines were all old, and there weren't enough of
them either. The mints were not producing coin quickly enough
to meet demand, and the country was in actual danger
of running out of legal physical money. This problem was
compounded by the fact that the mechanism of the government
put in place for allowing people to trade in their
(11:31):
old coins for new ones was not so good. They say,
for a given period of time, we will take coins
at their face value, regardless of how badly worn or
degreat they are. So if you present something that you
can see is a shilling but has lost half its weight,
and it's you know, batted and barely legible, the official
(11:52):
will still take it a shillings value, even though there's
only half a shilling's worth of silver there. But this
system was somewhat narrow. Only people who paid direct taxes
or made loans to the government were allowed to trade
cliped or debased money in for face value. The trade
in also only lasted five months, and that means that
those are in the know, those in the urban areas
(12:12):
who can really get onto this can make a huge
profit because you can gather a selection of very battered
coins which only have minimal silver value, tender them in
and actually get the full face value for them. The
people that suffer are those in the isolated areas, those
who are more remote and more rural, who cannot get
(12:34):
all this old coinage that they might have available to
the exchange in time in order to benefit from this,
because after a certain time you don't get that full
face value. Instead you just left with the weight of
the coinage. Within six months people had to sell their
old coins at weight, meaning that their coins had suddenly
(12:54):
lost as much as half of their value. By this time,
there wasn't enough re legal coin in circulation to pay
for the expenses of daily life. Here's writer John Evelyn's
diary entry from May. Money still continuing exceeding scarce, so
(13:16):
the done was paid or received, but all was on trust,
the mint not supplying for common necessities. Things were still
bad a month later. Want of current money to carry
on the smallest concerns even for daily provisions in the
markets guineas lowered to twenty two shillings and great sums
(13:37):
daily transported to Holland, where at yields more with other
treasures sent to pay the armies. And so imprudent was
the late Parliament to condemn the old though clipped and
corrupted till they had provided supplies to this at the
fraud of the bankers and goldsmiths, who, having gotten immense
riches by extortion, keep up their treasure in expectation of
(14:01):
enhancing its value. The mint, Underneil's very hands off leadership,
was floundering. Nothing considerable coined of the new and now
only current stamp. Of course, such a scarcity that tumults
every day feed that there wasn't enough coin was bad
for wealthier people like John Evelyn, but again it was
(14:23):
much worse for the poor. Another contemporary observer wrote in
a private letter that the people are discontented to the utmost,
adding that many self murders were happening owing to the want,
and it was starting to look pretty bleak for the
government as well. For one thing, the want that drove
(14:46):
people to kill themselves might just as easily drive them
to rage and riot. These were and are the conditions
that lead to revolution, and in fact, at least one
town saw people arrested for rioting after attack. Collector refused
to take the old coins, but what else were they
going to pay with? And that's the other thing. When
(15:08):
the people can't pay rent or taxes, the government's coffers
start to empty. This government was already in trouble, so
the sudden lack of revenue made things that much worse.
Soldiers in some parts of the country were being paid
in provisions because there wasn't enough coin to pay them
in real money. Mutinous grumblings added to the tumult, and
(15:28):
everyone started squinting at the King and Queen suspiciously. If
Isaac Newton had wanted an easy gig, he had become
Warden of the Royal Mint at exactly the wrong time
(15:55):
Act two. Out with the Old in with the Newton.
To put it diccinctly, the Mint was a shambles, a
mess that was threatening to undermine the economy, the new monarchy,
the country's fragile financial institutions, everything. And when he was
confronted with this mess, Warden Isaac Newton didn't do what
(16:19):
Master Neil had done, and he didn't do what every
other warden had done, which was basically nothing. A Newson
could have done that. But Newson was not that sort
of puss. That's Dr Patricia Farah, Cambridge historian and Newton expert.
He went in the very energetically and decided he was
going to overhaul the system and make it work properly.
(16:40):
And he was a very very dedicated, systematic, organized manager.
Newton rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He was,
as one biographer later said, a born administrator. Thomas Fowl,
a clerk at the Mint, actually wrote to Newton to
tell him that he was the first wordens since at
least sixteen seventy two who didn't treat the post as
(17:04):
a signic cure. If I may be so bold to say,
we shall find you fair to exceed the rest for
the gooden privileges of the Mint, more than all your predecessors.
Foul also spent the majority of this letter explaining all
the ways that the previous wardens had disappointed. Sir Anthonys
and Ledger, then warden of the Mint, came very seldom
(17:26):
to the place, and did not anything of service more
than to come and ask how the affairs of the
Mint were, And that was all, and so went his
way foul might have been trying to get on Newton's
good side, certainly, but Charles Montague, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer who gave Newton the job, later said that the
recoinage couldn't have happened without him. Nietzsan was absolutely meticulous
(17:50):
in everything that he did. He was a very thorough man.
It seems that all the energy he put into making
observations of the stars or holding the dates of ancient
events that happened thousands of years ago, he turned all
that energy into making sure that the mint was rung
as efficiently as the microscope had only really just been invented,
(18:14):
but Newton was putting the mints operations under it. Metaphorically speaking.
Newton researched the history of the mint going back two
hundred years. He went through decades of accounting books, making
notes in the margins. He was an obsessive copier. He
could have had his assistance copied down all the meeting notes,
(18:36):
all his letters and correspondence with the Treasury and others,
but he did it himself. Haines, bring the records. I
want all the receipts and accounting books and the warrants.
This meant that Newton was aware of all the mints business,
so much so that he knew who was trying to
get one over on the Mint, as the Treasury already
paid the cop For example, he told the Treasury not
(18:59):
to pay the carpenters until the quality of their work
was checked. We are humbly off opinion that the work
done by the carpenter and the rest of the workman
ought to be surveyed and valued before their whole bills
are paid off. Another time, he kept the Mint from
signing a contract with some metal dealers who had offered
(19:19):
to take over the recoinage at a very steep markup.
These goldsmiths want how much preposterous? From my observations, the
Mint can do for at least a third less than
these Charlatan's propose. Golden Neil has made a mess of
this mood that he was spending his wife's money and
not the Treasury. Is within a month and a half
(19:40):
on the job, Newton had shouldered useless Neil out of
the way and was basically doing his job too. We
are in the business of making money, not spending it needlessly.
Newton knew that in order for the Mint to meet
the demands of the Treasury. Some things, a lot of
things had to change. If you can keep reason above passion,
(20:02):
that and watchfulness will be your best defendants. Newton saw
that the machines were producing a maximum of fifteen thousand
pounds of coin a week. The treasury wanted thirty pounds
of coin a week. This was a mass problem. Newton
(20:24):
calculated that he'd need two new smelting furnaces, eight new
rolling mills, and five new coining presses. This sort of
empirical data collection, this was what Newton was really really
good at. For example, as Thomas Levinson noted in his
book Newton in the Counterfeiter, Newton realized that a new
(20:44):
melting pot could hold eight hundred pounds of silver metal,
but within six weeks that capacity was reduced to just
six and fifty pounds because the pot actually got smaller
as the silver codd it. This effected the output and
the number of coins that could be produced, so Newton
determined that a part was only good for about a
hundred and twenty meltings. Newton cast his eye around the
(21:06):
workshop looking for more inefficiencies. There is also a waste
in the milling by the dripping off off the sand
with some particles of silver, and by some blanks falling
out of the pan upon the half and shreds of
silver lost in the dust, or by sticking to the
workman's shoes. Then he turned to the men themselves. One
(21:29):
of the things that he did was to institute what
we would call time and motion studies, and he watched
all the people working, and he insisted that they should
work far, far faster to make the work more efficient.
Newton calculated the rate at which mint workers could turn
out coins. Two mills with four millers, twelve horses, two horsekeepers,
(21:53):
three cutters, two flatters, eight sizes, one kneeler, three blanches,
too markers to press his with fourteen laborers to pull
at them, can coin three thousand pounds up money per diam.
Newton said, the men operating the press needed to produce
fifty to fifty five coins a minute in order to
make three thou pounds of coin a day. That's almost
(22:16):
a coin every second. That's fast. It is physically demanding.
And the four gentlemen who are pulling on the on
the ropes as part of the screw press, and there's
the demands as such that they can only operate in
shifts of fifteen minutes before they're exhausted. So they're doing
fifteen minutes on they'll swap out. Four more people come
in fifteen minutes, and so they're constantly swapping in and out.
(22:42):
This does not make Newton popular with his new staff. Unsurprisingly,
all the staff disliked him because he made the work
at a far higher rate, since he got rid of
all the little private practices where people were making money
on the site. So he was a very very efficient manager.
He was also a ruthless manage I don't think Newton
(23:02):
was particularly well liked at all, if I'm honest. I
mean there are there are accounts of people who get
on with him. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't. He
was not disliked by everybody, but there was also a
lot of people he rubbed up the wrong way. I
think he's probably one of those individuals where if he
took a disliking to you, that was it. No matter
what you did, no matter what you could do, you've
had it. Newton's efforts and indifference to the opinions of
(23:26):
his staff paid off. Between sixteen ninety six and seventeen hundred,
The value of the silver struck by the Mint was
more than five point one million pounds. That was about
two million pounds more than had been made in the
previous thirty five years put together, and more importantly, by
(23:46):
September sixteen ninety six, silver coin was again flowing through
the veins of the country's economy. There were no major riots,
no revolution, and both the King and Queen kept their heads.
Newton thought he deserved a raise, or at least as
much as Neil was getting, for being master. The salary
(24:06):
of the warden of his Majesty's Mint is only four
pound per annum, with a house where forty pound per annum,
and his purposes are only three pound twelve shillings per
annum for call, all which taxes being deducted. Is so
small in respect of the salaries and purposes of the
other officers of the Mint, as suffices not to support
(24:29):
the authority of his office. It seems that Newton got
that raise, But there was still another problem facing the Mint,
and this one wasn't something Newton could solve through a
time and motion study. This was a problem that would,
at least for a while, consume the majority of Newton's
time as warden bringing clippers and counterfeiters to justice, and
(24:53):
it was a part of Newton's job that he was
not happy about at all. Nor is there any reward
or encouragement appointing for my service in these matters? Nor
am I provided with any competent assistance to enable me
to grapple with an undertaking soul vac sastious and dangerous?
(25:14):
Is this coming up on Newton's Law? We know by
now that this most vexatious counterfeiter, William Chaloner, is no
run of the mill coiner, So how will his play
for the mint itself turn out? The Mint is either
incompetent or corrupt or both. Newton's Law is a production
(25:40):
of I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me
Linda Rodriguez McRobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our
producer is Emily Marina. 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
(26:00):
checking by me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice acting by Keith Fleming,
Mark McDonald and Robert Jack. Special thanks to Chris Barker
and Dr Patricia Farrell. Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur and
Fineflex Sound Studios. Our show logo is designed by Lucy Continia.
Thanks for listening, Bloodio
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