Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/159

Rh an issue this same year of silver pennies, of which 266 were made out of the pound. Two years after he coined 270 pennies out of the pound of silver; and in 1351 he issued a new groat to be current at the old rate of four- pence, although it scarcely weighed more than three pennies and a half even of his last diminished money. There are two groats of Edward III., one with the title of King of France, the other without. It is upon his coins also that we first read the motto Dieu et mon droit (God and my right), which was originally adopted in allusion to the claim to the French crown. He also coined half groats.

The coins of Richard II., which are nobles, half nobles, quarter nobles, groats, half-groats, pence, and halfpence, are of the same real values with those last coined by his grandfather. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish his silver money, from the want of the numerals, from that of Richard III.

The Scottish money was deteriorated in the course of this period to a still greater extent than the English; the parliament in 1367 having ordered that 352 pennies should be made out of the pound of silver. It is supposed that gold money was first coined in Scotland in the reign of Robert II. (A.D. 1371-1390). There were repeated coinages of money in Ireland; but in 1339 we find a species of coin of inferior quality, and apparently of foreign fabrication, authorised to pass current in that country, on the ground of the insufficient amount of good money. These base pieces were called turneys, or black-money, or sometimes black-mail, from the French word maille, anciently used for a piece of money.

Even the legal coins of this period are generally rude in workmanship, and by no means of uniform weight. The standard of weight at this time was scarcely more artificial than that which Henry I. established for measures of length, when he ordered that the ell should be as long as the royal arm. The statute called the Assize of Weights and Measures, which is attributed, in some copies, to the reign of Henry III., in others to that of Edward I., states that, "by consent of the whole realm,