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but that of his father, Henry. This strange fact seems to be due to a desire to maintain uniformity in the currency; a new and improved coinage of pennies having been introduced in 1180 by Henry II., and continued until the time of his death. In 1189, when Richard I. succeeded him, it must have been determined that no alteration should be made in the coinage; and so literally was this determination carried out, that even the name upon them was not changed. The same policy was pursued through the reign of John, who however coined in his own name for his Irish dominions; and, when Henry III. came to the throne, in 1216, he found the whole English coinage already bearing his superscription, and an image as like his own as that of anyone else.

In 1248, Henry III. made a fresh alteration in the coinage by making the double cross, which formed the usual design upon the reverse, extend to the edge of the penny, instead of ending at the circle within the moneyer's name. The use of this double cross may not be at once apparent; but there is little doubt that it was intended as a guide for those who required half-pennies and farthings, for, in those days, a literal interpretation was placed upon the words, and a halfpenny was made by cutting a penny in half, and a farthing by cutting it into four pieces.

It was reserved for Edward I. to get over this difficulty of obtaining small change, though several of his predecessors had attempted it, and as we have seen, some round halfpence were struck under Alfred. John also struck halfpence and farthings for use in Ireland. It was indeed he who, according to Matthew Paris, fulfilled the prophecy of Merlin that "the representation of barter shall be divided-the half shall be round."

In England, however, it was not until the year 1279 that any extensive coinage of round halfpence and farthings took place. It was then, as Langtoft says in his Chronicle, that

Edward did smyte rounde peny, halfpeny, ferthyng,
The croyce passed the bounde of all thorghout the ryng.
The kynge's side galle be the hede and his name writen,
The croyce side, what cite it was in coined and smyten.
The pouere man ne the preste the peny prayses no thing,
Men gyf God the lest, they feffe him with a ferthnig.
A thousand and tuo hundred and fourscore yeres mo,
On this mone men wondred fist whan it gan go.

A representation of a penny of this coinage of Edward I. is given in the diagram (Fig. 4). It was, as you will observe, minted in London, and bears the abbreviated name of Edward, as King ot England and Lord of Ireland, on the obverse. The number of English towns in which there were mints had, by Edward's time, been somewhat reduced. Besides London there were Berwick, Bristol, Canterbury, Chester, Durham, Exeter, Hull, Lincoln, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Reading, St. Edmunds Bury, and York.

In

his reign there was only one moneyer, Robert de Hadleie, whose name is given on the coins. He was, I believe, a moneyer in the Abbot's mint at St. Edmunds Bury. The weight by which the coinage was regulated was the pound tower, which like the pound troy, consisted of twelve ounces, each of twenty pennyweights. The pound tower, however, only weighed 5,400 grains troy, instead of 5,760, so that it was in fact three-fourths of an ounce lighter, and the pennyweight was only 22 grains troy.

An old statute, presumed to be of Henry III., fixed the weight of a sterling at that of thirty-two corns of wheat taken from the middle of the ear, and this was renewed under Edward I. In order to see how far our wheat at the present time corresponded with that of six centuries ago, I weighed thirty-two grains taken from the middle of the ear and found that when dry they exactly balanced a pennyweight. This was, however, of troy weight and not of tower weight, so that the modern wheat was 1 grains in 24, or rather more than 6 per cent. heavier than the old. Before, however, we can take credit for even this amount of improvement, many more such experiments should be made.

It was

It would involve an unnecessary amount of detail were I to attempt to notice all the changes which the penny underwent in the successive reigns of the English monarchs since Edward I. I may, however, call attention to some of the principal events in the history of this coin. Under Edward its weight, as already observed, was still 22 grains troy, but under Edward III. it was reduced to 201, 20, and finally to 18 grains. Under Henry IV. it dwindled to 15 grains, to fall under Edward IV. to 12 grains. reserved for Henry VIII. to take the greatest liberties with the coinage, and even with the standard of the silver from which it was struck. He not only reduced the weight of the penny to 10 grains but the so-called silver from which it was struck consisted of one-third only of the precious metal, the other two-thirds being alloy. For a short time during the reign of his successor, Edward VI., the proportion of alloy to silver was actually as three to one. Towards the end of his reign, however, the youthful king, who seems to have taken a strong personal interest in the coinage, restored the silver to nearly the old sterling standard, though the penny had to come down in weight to 8 grains. At the end of the reign of Elizabeth it fell to 73 grains, at which weight it remained until 1816, when it was again reduced to about 7 grains, but, owing to the adoption of a gold standard, the silver coins became more of the nature of tokens, than absolute representatives of value. I have spoken of the silver penny as if it were still a current coin, but, as you all know, it has long since disappeared from circulation, though silver pennies are struck in each year to form part of the Royal gifts on Maundy Thursday.

Strange as it may appear, it was not until the year 1797 that

any copper pennies were issued by royal authority, and these with a broad rim and of the weight of one ounce avoirdupois, remained in circulation until within the memory of most of us, when they were supplanted by the bronze pennies of 1860. There had in the meantime been pennies of lighter weight than an ounce struck from 1806 downwards. Though pennies in copper were so late in making their appearance, halfpennies had preceded them by about 120 years, and several attempts to introduce small change in a more readily visible and tangible form than it could be in silver had been made in earlier times. There seems to have been some feeling on the part of our monarchs that it was beneath their dignity to have their images impressed on baser metals than gold or silver, and though the want of small money was felt even in the time of Elizabeth, she never got beyond issuing a few tokens, such as may be termed metallic bank notes, which were called the pledges of a penny or a halfpenny as the case might be. She introduced, however, silver coins of 3d., 1d. and 2d., which were distinguished from the 1d., 2d. and 4d. by having a rose at the side of the queen's head. By a bold anachronism Shakspere makes the bastard Faulconbridge allude to this coinage in the time of King John

"My face so thin

That in mine ear I durst not stick a rose,

Lest men should say, Look where three farthings goes!"

James I. and Charles I. got no farther than issuing brass and copper tokens of the presumed value of a farthing, for which, however, there appears to have been some difficulty in obtaining their nominal value in silver and which never became popular. Perhaps this arose from so many tradesmen having started tokensembodying promises to pay-of their own. In James I.'s time most of these were cast in lead, and as but a small proportion of them came back to the issuers they were a source of no small profit. It has been said that early in the 17th century there were not less than 3,000 tradesmen in London alone who cast these leaden tokens, the aggregate nominal value of which was not less than £15,000, and these had to be renewed almost every year.

When, after the troublous times of Charles I., the country became more settled during the latter years of the Commonwealth, and in the early part of the reign of Charles II., the want of small change was again severely felt, and tradesmen of every variety of calling both in London and in the country issued tokens in abundance of the nominal value of farthings, halfpence and pence, though but few of the largest denomination were struck. Of the tokens issued by the London traders a large collection is preserved in the Guildhall Library, and an interesting descriptive Catalogue of them has been published. Of London and Southwark upwards of 3,000 are known. Evelyn, writing in 1697, seems to have been more happy

in prophecy than in history, for though forgetting that the majority of the tokens were issued in the days of the merry monarch, he speculates on what will be thought of them at some future time. He speaks of "the Tokens which every Tavern and Tipplinghouse (in the days of the late anarchy among us) presumed to stamp and utter for immediate exchange, as they were passable through the neighbourhood, which though seldom reaching farther than the next street or two, may happily in after times, come to exercise and busie the learned Critic, what they should signifie, and fill whole volumes with their conjectures."

It would take up a whole evening to give a complete idea of these promissory tokens, many of which are of topographical and some of historical interest. As a record of the old signs of shops, which in those days were by no means confined to the houses where liquor was sold, these pieces are very curious. The trade of the issuer is very often symbolized by the arms of the Company to which he belonged,

As an illustration of the general character of these tokens I may give the description of two of them

Obverse.

Reverse.

Obverse.
Reverse.

AVRTHVR STANLEY.
HALFE PENNY.

In the field HIS

IN EXCHAINGE ALLEY 1666. Portal of the
Old Royal Exchange.

John Backster at the Mother Read Capp in Hollway
1667. In six lines.

J. B. His Halfe Peny. Half length figure of
Mother Red Cap holding a pot of beer.

Generally speaking, these brass or copper tokens are from the size of a silver threepence to that of a sixpence, but thinner, so that the profit on their issue must have been great. I must not, however, dwell on these substitutes for a legitimate coinage. Their issue was forbidden under severe penalties in 1672, and in that year, or rather in 1673, were issued the first copper half pence and farthings made current as coins by royal authority. In size and weight they somewhat exceeded those of the present day, and they bore on the obverse the head of Charles II., as Charles the son of Charles, and on the reverse Britannia, with a seated female figure. original of this figure appears to have been the beautiful Mrs. Stuart, afterwards Duchess of Richmond-a lady in considerable favour with the king-though the general design was borrowed from a coin of the Roman Emperor Hadrian.

The

We need hardly follow the copper coinage down to modern times I may however just allude to the popular idea as to the extreme scarcity and value of the farthing of Queen Anne, of which it has

Numismata-a Discourse of Medals, p. 16.

often been said that only three were struck. The fact is, that there exist no less than six varieties of them, though one kind only was struck for circulation, the others being patterns, or trial-pieces. These are some of them very rare, and the current farthing, though some hundreds must have been struck, is sufficiently scarce to be now appraised at nearly a thousand times its original value. I may also add that at the end of the last century the national coinage having been again neglected, the necessity for small change again called into existence a host of tradesmen's tokens not of diminutive size, like those of the 17th century, but fully as large and heavy as any of the copper coins issued by the royal mint.

We must now turn from the aliquot parts of the penny to its multiples, and especially the shilling, which forms the second part of my subject. The derivation of the name of shilling is doubtful, but the word scill or scilling appears in the Anglo-Saxon laws so early as the seventh century. It has been regarded by various authors as derived from scellan, to sound; scylan, to divide ; sceale, a scale in Saxon, and from sicilicus, a quarter of an ounce in Latin. In mediæval times, however, the word shilling was always Latinized as solidus, a Roman coin, which was originally of gold, and about seventy grains in weight.

Though the term was so well known in Saxon times it was only in use in accounts, as shillings were then never coined. Even their nominal value varied: there being sometimes four pennies and sometimes five to the shilling. From the writings of Elfric, who flourished at the end of the tenth century, and from some other Saxon documents, it appears, however, that there was also a shilling of twelve pence, and that twenty of these shillings went to the pound, which also was in those times merely a money of account. I have, indeed, already mentioned the fact that until the time of the Edwards, the penny, with an occasional issue of halfpence, was the only current silver coin of the realm. In the days of Edward I. the desirability of some larger silver coin was felt, and in 1279 an agreement was made with William de Turnemire, of Marseilles, who had come over here to superintend the coinage, "that he should make a great sterling to be of the value of four lesser sterlings." This was in imitation of the Gros Tournais of the French coinage, and the word gros gave us the English gross or groat, a piece of four pence. But very few of this first issue of groats are known. Their scarcity may have arisen from a disinclination on William de Turnemire's part to coin them, for he was bound by the agreement to account to the king for any extra profit that might arise from his coining large pieces instead of small. Under Edward III., however, groats and half groats of the value of four and two pence respectively formed an integral part of the coinage, and under the later Edwards and Henries were struck in as great abundance as the pennies.

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