Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/197

Rh, to be presently noticed, gold and silver pieces of the same denominations that have been already described. Although, however, the names, and also the relative values, of the coins continued unchanged, their positive values, or the actual quantities of metal of which they were formed, underwent a succession of diminutions. It has been stated that, whereas, originally, 240 pennies were coined out of the Tower pound of silver, weighing 5400 grains troy, Edward III. coined out of the same quantity of silver 270 pennies; thus reducing the quantity of silver in each penny from 22½ to 20 grains. The effect of this would be to depreciate the penny by the amount of about one-third of a farthing, and the nominal pound (which was still held to contain 20 shillings, or 240 pence) by about 6s. 6d. in our present money; thus reducing it from about 56s. 3d. to somewhat less than 50s. The groats, or fourpenny pieces, afterwards issued by Edward III., carried the depreciation still farther than this; each of these coins weighing only 72 grains instead of 90, which they ought to have done according to the original scale, or 80, which even the lately reduced rate would have demanded. A shilling paid in these groats was worth only about 2s. 3d. of our present money, instead of about 2s. 9½d., its original value; and a pound paid in the same coin was only about 46 of our present shillings.

Such, then, were the values of the several silver coins at the accession of Henry IV. That king, in 1412, depreciated the currency still more by coining the Tower pound into 30 shillings by tale—that is to say, into 360 pennies; the effect of which was to reduce the amount of silver in each penny to 15 grains, and the value of the penny to not quite 2d., of the shilling to about 1s. 10½d., and of the pound to 1l. 17s. 9d. of our present money. The strange reason iissigned for this alteration was '"the great scarcity of money in the realm,"—as if money, or anything else of intrinsic value, could be made more plentiful by the easy process of cutting each piece into two. The ordinance, which stands on the rolls of parliament, however, betrays a consciousness that the ingenious expedient was not likely to succeed. The new mode of