Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/371

1548.] which the Government were responsible formed but a fraction of the mischief. Sir William Sharington first of all, controller of the mint at Bristol, who had been directed, when the other mints were busy, to keep his own inactive, made an opportunity of the prohibition. The inhabitants of the Somersetshire villages made away surreptitiously with their church plate. Sharington became the general purchaser, and threw it upon the country in testons, or bad shillings, in which four ounces of pure metal were mixed with eight of alloy. The profit he kept to himself, and his accounts he falsified. How much bad money he had coined he could not tell, but he admitted to have gained at least four thousand pounds. The possession of a mint made Sharington the first in the field, but naturally in a little while the entire currency was infected. The pure coin was bought up, and coining establishments were set at work in France and Flanders and in remote corners of Europe. Bad and good money could not co-exist together, and the good disappeared. The Protector was conscious at last of the nature of what was going forward. In the spring of 1548, a proclamation was issued that the teston should be current only till the following December, and that up to that time it would be received at the mints and paid for at its nominal value. But this only increased the speed of the coiners, and the magnitude of the evil was already too much for a treasury exhausted by war. Meantime the money