Tea at Trianon: Money in Stuart and Tudor Times

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Money in Stuart and Tudor Times

From Tudor Times:

For many centuries, in both countries, only the pennies were available as actual coinage. Each individual coin was created by hammering: the minter laid a small amount of silver on the die, then put the reverse die on top of the silver and hit it hard. It was a painstaking and laborious process. So slow, in fact, that although there were quite a few mints across the country, there were never enough coins in circulation and the lack of them was a drag on economic progress.

Multiples of pennies were not, initially, coins, but units of account. The familiar one is the shilling, which was the equivalent of twelve pence, but there was also the very widely used mark (merk in Scots), which was worth two-thirds of a pound, or 13s. 4d. The mark was used throughout Europe well into the reigns of Elizabeth I and James VI.

In due course, having only the penny coin became cumbersome and additional value coins began to be struck in both countries. However, because the currency was actually based on the value of the underlying precious metal, the face value of individual coins was not static as modern coins are, and from time to time the Government would announce that a particular coin now had a new value, as the precious metal price fluctuated. This makes understanding the currency tricky as a coin of the same name can have various different values at different times. (Read more.)