Episode 2: No Silver Linings

you going to pay with? You plunge your freezing fingers into your pocket. If you're a woman, this pocket is a little pouch tied to your waist. And if you're a man and your fashion forward, it's sewn into your clothes. But let's be honest, you're definitely a man if you're going to a coffeehouse, because most ladies weren't permitted. You pull out a silver penny, an old, busted, handhammered silver penny made before the restoration of the monarchy, some thirty

odd years prior. You place your penny on the counter nervously. The coffee house made eyes it suspiciously. She picks it up, testing the weight in her hand. It's a little bit thin, the edges look worn. From what she can tell, the king on it has been dead for more than half a century. Is she going to accept it? Given where we are in time, there's a very good chance that she won't. So why would the coffeehouse maid reject your

busted penny money's money? Right? Well, yes and no, because right about now, that's a bigger question than you might think, and it's one that will dictate not only the career of Isaac Newton, but also William Challoner. For I Heart Radio, I'm Linda Rodriguez mcrabie and this is Newton's Law and I Heart Original podcast. You are making episode two, No Silver Linings, Act one. For what it's worth, the coffee house made might not take your coin because it's so degraded.

But the fact was, in early most of the coins being traded throughout the country were degraded. England's currency is in crisis. You know that if you spent a lot of time in coffee houses, because these are places where people talk, and one of the things people were definitely talking about was the ongoing problems with the coinage, because the terrible thing when a man cannot poaches a dish of coffee for want of coin, I blame the mint. Barely the thin worn coins. Shopkeepers refuse them, and one

can barely discern between counterfeits, and they've justly made. There are rumors that Parlament men and the Treasury and the men are all planning to do something about it, but as yet they haven't. So while everyone holds their breath and waits for whatever the government decides, the status of

your particular coin hangs in the balance. The coffee housemaid can decide that your coin is simply too busted and turn you down, but then that means she's missing out on a sale, or she can accept a coin that is possibly worthless, or at least worth less. So say she does accept your battered coin, maybe against her better instincts, and you get your dish of coffee. You settle down at a table. There are a couple of newspapers and gazettes and pamphlets around, and you listen to the chatter

I have heard. The doctor is Newton is to be the warden of the mint. Indeed, I do hope you should have more to do with the affairs of the mint than the last warden. Okay, what was going on with the coinage? Well, we are going to get into that big time because it's the reason for this whole shebang, but we're going to first put that question on hold. We're going to start with another question. What actually is a coin? At its most basic coin is money a

representative way to store value. We can exchange that value for other things, goods and services. So money is a medium of exchange, a way to facilitate trade or purchasing. And from way back in the day, metal was ideal for this representative exchange function because it was something that most people agreed had inherent value, It was easily transferable, it was durable, and it was easily divisible on like

say a cow. Metal coins date back to around six b C with the Lydians people and what's now to Turkey. Minting started in Britain in the second century b C with the various Celtic tribes, and then in a more regular way with the Romans. There was a mint in London dating from the third century, but then the Romans left and London went through a kind of wild adolescence.

But By the time about For the Great, the ninth century Anglo Saxon ruler who really laid the groundwork for the unification of England's various sovereign states, there was a working mint in the city turning out the kingdom's coins. By the seventeenth century, England's monetary system was based on a bi metallic standard, high denomination gold coins and lower denomination silver coins, and the coins derived their value from the actual weight of the gold or silver they contained.

A penny, for example, was worth a penny because that was the value of the twenty four grains of silver it contained. Because unlike today where we have coins and we we just hand them over, the kinage in the eighties six nineties relies on its weight in silver to give it its value. That's Chris Parker, historian at the

Royal Mint. As in the same royal mint that Alfred the Great started back in the ninth century and the one that Newton becomes warden of in the seventeenth century, and that still makes our coins now in the twenty first century. Anyway, value based on weight seems very logical. But here's the problem. By the sixteen nineties, many many of the coins in circulation, like You're busted penny did not contain the amount of silver their face value promised

they did. So if you had a coin that was reduced in weight because it had silver removed from it, it had lost some of its value, and you could go to a shop and try and buy a shillings worth of goods with a worn, battered, degraded shilling, the shopkeeper isn't going to take that shillings value because he can see it's lost weight. So as a huge problem from an economic perspective that you're affecting trade. So, yeah, you're lucky got that coffee, But why wouldn't your penny

contain those twenty four grains of silver? After all? Isn't it the job of the Royal mint to make sure that it did well? Yes, but in the six nineties several long simmering problems had just come to the boil. First start, many of the coins were so degraded because the vast majority of those coins were hand hammered. Hand Hammering was how coins had been made for pretty much as long as there had been coins. This was an imprecise process. Coins were never each quite the same. The

engravings were often off center. The edges weren't milled, meaning they didn't have the finish or the grooves that you see on modern coins. This irregularity meant that they degraded or looked degraded more easily, and some people, a lot of people took advantage of this. The easiest and perhaps most damaging way people messed with the coinage was clipping.

People would him off a tiny amount of metal around the edge of the coin, then hammer the coin thinner to make up the size, and then they'd gather up all those tiny silver shavings, combine them and melt them down into bars or ingots and sell those off. This was free money, and it was easy to get away with because it was difficult to tell a coin that

was intentionally clipped from one that was just old. Everybody was degrading the coinage because it was in such a poor state anyway, and so once you get a majority of people doing it, it's it sort of takes away the stigma of doing something illegal, particularly when it's being done by respected banker's shopkeepers. People were just doing it

on a regular basis. It sounds almost trivial, what's a little off the edges, But This was a tremendous problem because again it degraded the actual value of the coin in your hand. Philosopher John Locke wrote, I do not see how in a little while we shall have any money or goods at all in England if clipping be not immediately stopped. Clipping is a great leak, which for some time past has contributed more to sink us than

all the forces of our enemies could do. Some Mark and Newton included even suspected that foreign powers were trimming English money just to synchronation that much faster. The terrible state of the hand hammered coins also meant that they were easier to counterfeit using less valuable materials. You didn't even have to do a very good job. Well, if you can imagine what you're trying to counterfeit is nothing except a very very badly worn blank disc with some

vague images on it that's over a century old. Incredibly easy because you don't have to be a very good artist, You don't have to be a very good engraver. You can knock up some incredibly substandard eyes and you can put something out there that very easily resembles a batted, worn shilling sixpence or half crown that was over a century old. It wasn't that difficult. Counterfeiting and clipping often went together. Sometimes clippers would melt down all those little

slivers of silver to use in counterfeiting new coins. Clipping was so widespread that counterfeiters often clipped their own fakes to make them seem more authentic and counterfeiting well. Counterfeiting was so rampant that some estimates claimed that one out of every ten coins in circulation was fake. That was super bad for people at all levels of English society, from the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the butcher, baker and candlestick makers. Not to mention the seventeenth century baristas.

Silver was the lifeblood of the economy. This is what everyone would have used to pay for daily expenses. If there wasn't enough of it to go around, or if what there was was debased and distrusted costs rows astronomically, economic life ground to a halt. The thing was, it didn't have to be this way. The Mint had a solution right there in its workshop. Act two. Msieur Blondeaux

and his marvelous machines. Peter blonde was an engineer at the Paris Mint when he was noticed by England's Parliament in sixte How and why he was noticed I don't know that. The important part is that the Treasury Committee believed that Blondo had worked on improving the French coin, specifically with using these new machines to mill, press and edge coins, and that he could be persuaded to come to England. This was a year of massive political upheaval.

Charles the First was beheaded by the Parliamentarians, ending the monarchy. Oliver Cromwell appeared in general ame Lord Protector of the newly made Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Wales, and he also canceled Christmas. The change in regime necessitated a change in coins, after all. In addition to being a medium of exchange, coins are also an easily disseminated reminder of

who's in charge. Blundo was invited by Parliament's Mint Committee to demonstrate his milling and edging technique in sixteen fifty. That year, after showing his very fine pieces to the committee, Blundo published a pamphlet a bit of propaganda, describing the benefits of his machinery. A humble representation of Peter Blundo, followed by another a most humble memorandum from Peter Blunde. Spoiler alert, these were not humble. Blondo started by pointing

out everything that was wrong with hand hammered coins. The money coined with emma can not to be made exactly long, nor equal in weight and bigness, and is often ghostly marked and have many odds of folds, which gives a great facility to the false coiners to counterfeit it also to the clippers to clip it, it being very hard to discern between eclipped piece in one note clipped. Blondo,

as the Treasury knew, had a better way. Milt coinage was a German invention dating as far back as fifty Instead of hammering an image into a blank coin, Milt coining used a screw press to sink the engraving deep into the metal. The innovation was brought to France, where the mechanism was improved and adopted by the engineers at the Paris meant the machines produced regularly sized and weighted coins with precise images, which made them more difficult to counterfeit.

But Blondo's edging technique was the real start, allowing him to put a grooved finish or even a phrase on the edges. This would make a coin nearly impossible to clip without detection. Blundo wasn't the first to introduce these machines to the Royal Mint, however, previous attempts had largely failed, and you can chalk that up to a few things. The cost of setting up and running the new machines was considerable, and they were rumored to break down easily.

There was also the English distrust of anything foreign, especially French. But perhaps more significantly, there was the fact that the Company of money Ears, more or less hereditary Union Slash Guild, had had the exclusive contract with the Mint to produce the coins for centuries, but in sixteen fifty the New Commonwealth needed new coins, and the Treasury was willing to

give Blundo a chance. The money Ears for obvious reasons, We're not It didn't help that Blundo not only wanted their job and claimed they were rubbish at it, but he also accused the money Ears of corruption. In his pamphlets.

He alleged that the hammered coin fresh from the Mint was of disparate weights, and that this was intentional and it was the poor he said, who suffered for it, which turns to the great ruin and destruction of commerce and undoing those poor people who spend their money little by little. Blondo was essentially accusing the money Ears of

serious corruption, of fraud. This really piste them off, of course, and they came back with a pamphlet of their own, a most humble remonstrance for Peter blonde Also not humble. The moneyers responded that Blondo couldn't do anything that they couldn't already do, branded him a liar, and slammed him for daring to claim that the money they made was

ill favoredly coined. Blondo, they said, not only maligned the good name of the company of money Ears, but also most falsely to imprint in the hearts and minds of all people in Christendom, and more especially the good people under the obedience of the Parliament of England, that the monies of this Commonwealth are not justly made. Blondeau was undermining not only English confidence in the currency, but global confidence in it as well with his force and scandalous libels.

In sixteen fifty one, the Treasury decided to settle the matter with a competition a money off. Treasury officials said, fine, each of you design and make a half crown, a shilling and sixpence coin, and we'll see which ones are better. David Rammage, the provost of the moneyers, was their champion. Provost was an elected position, meaning that Rammage was a

man of some reputation and power. And now in the Great money Off of sixty one, this reputation and the reputation of the company and its contract with the Mint was on the line. I mustn't file damn that frenchman's block ready set money make Brammage made the coins in the way that they always had, Using a hammer in his own hands, he placed the plan, set the blank coin on the anvil die to get the alignment perfect.

Holding the top die in place, he swung the hammer, bringing it down on the die and stamping the image into the metal. One done, h two oh three. Blundo and his team meanwhile got his machines rolling one two, three, ten seconds remaining. I. By the end of the allotted time, Rammont had made twelve coins, twelve coins that were a bit wonky, that didn't quite look all the same, twelve coins that looked like most of the money passed throughout

the Kingdom, which is to say not great. Blondo meanwhile made three hundred coins, three hundred perfectly weighted, regularly sized coins of impeccable quality and design, complete with a lettered edge that no clipper could clip. On the half crown piece, it read truth in Peace Ste Peter Blonde's inventor facet That's Latin for he made congratulations to Mont Senior Blondo

and his marvelous machines. Ram failed Blundo one. But despite the fact that Blondo's machines were clearly superior, the treasury passed on them. They just couldn't afford it. After all, it takes money to make money. But then a stroke of luck, the English fleet captured a load of Spanish treasure at the Battle of Cadiz in sixteen fifty six, and suddenly the Commonwealth was able to pay for Blondo

and his machines. But then Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell's death in sixteen fifty eight more or less ended the protector at experiment, and it left Blundo without well a protector. He shipped his machinery off to Edinburgh and himself back to France, and he would have stayed there too, had it not been for the terrible quality of the coins minted for the restoration. King Charles the second Blundo was invited back in sixteen sixty two, and this time given

a twenty one year contract. The money ears might even have gotten to keep their jobs too, because these machines still needed skilled men to run them. So the monarchy's back blunders back and Christmass back to Huzza. Things should have been good, right whoa not so much? Act three Fighting the Silver Bullet. In sixteen sixty three, Samuel Peeps, the famous diary writer, a guy who was everywhere in the seventeenth century, toured the mince facilities. This was just

after Blundo set up shop. Some of the machines were meant to be secret, but Peeps was a man who knows some people. He later becomes one of Newton's closest friends. We were sharing this method of making new money from the beginning to the end, which is so pretty. They say that this way is more charged to the king in the old way, but it is meter freeer from

clipping or counterfeiting. The putting of the words upon the edge is not to be done without an engine of the charge, and noise that no counterfeit will venture upon, and it employs as many men as the old and speedy for the next thirty years. The Mint used these machines to make the coins when they made the coins, which wasn't an all the time kind of thing. If you want a sense of what made Peep so giddy,

listen to Chris Barker describe how they worked. The Mint will get the raw bullion coming in and then they will melt down the gold and silver and they will cast them out into thin strips to get them to the correct thickness for coining. The next part of the processes you put them through a machinery which actually blanks them. So you're getting the blank discs out of that strip of metal, and they'll be weighed to make sure that the correct weight, and then you've got a sufficient blank

and ready for processing. You will end up striking the coin using something called screw press, a ginormous t shape. The blank was sandwiched between the dyes which carried the images. One was on the end of the tea and one

was on the anvil. Two strong men would turn the screw press, wishing the blank in between the person you're gonna reserve your sympathy for as a gentleman who's doing the putting the blanks on and flicking the finished coin all or off, because they've had their fingers crushed repeatedly by having several tons descend on them as they're trying to put blanks and flicked finished coins off. Finally you

get a finished coin after that striking process. The smaller coins had a milled grooved edge, and the larger coins had a phrase decks at tutaman, which was Latin for a decoration and a safeguard. Fun fact, this phrase was on the coins until two thousand seventeen when the new pound coin was introduced and the machines did do what Blondo promised they would. It was harder to clip a machine mild coin, and it was harder to counterfeit them,

and yet clipping and counterfeiting persisted. In fact, they got worse. Why because the Treasury never recalled the old hand hammered coins. Honestly, it is exactly like the scene in foulter Geist when Craig T. Nelson is all, you moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn't you. And just like in foulter geist. The old coins caused all kinds of problems. This basically left two sets of coinage in the country, the good new machine mild coins and the bad old

hand hammered coins, and both were legal tender. Silver was still being clipped off the old coins and much the time leaving the country to be sold elsewhere. Counter Fit coins flourished because your basic coiners could still do a brisk business knocking out messy hand hammered coins. Meanwhile, some clever if you like William Chaloner had figured out how to fake these supposedly unfakeable coins. Compounding the problem. People merchants,

especially tended to hoard the good coins. Chris Barker, You've got these brand new, lovely regular coins. What are you going to do. If you're a normal individual who sees these coming into coming into them through the banks and through their change. You're not going to use and spend those brand new coins. You're going to hold them because you know they have a good value. So if you're slightly and scrupulous, what you'll do is you melt down the good coins because you know exactly the way, you

know exactly the fineness. You can create bullion, which you can then sell onto the continent as a profit. The price of silver had recently gone up in some markets, meaning that silver was worth more as buoy on the raw metal basically in continental Europe than it was as face value coins in England. This is what's called arbitrage, which is basically exploiting the difference in price commodities fetch

in different markets for a profit. So English silver is being sold for continental gold, leaving only the bad, old, degraded coins in the hands of the people, and by the sixteen nineties it was estimated that only one out of every two hundred coins was a machine milled coin. The rest were old and busted and below weight or

just straight up fake. What all of this added up to the clipping the counterfeiting the arbitrage markets was that there was a serious shortage of silver, and the longer the old coins stayed in circulation, the longer clippers and coiners stayed in operation, and the supply of silver coins perpetually shrank. By now, the stock of real silver coins from the pennies to the crowns had dwindled almost to the point of extinct. That might explain why the coffee

has made took your penny. She didn't know when she'd see another. The situation became more problematic after the so called Glorious Revolution of which removed the Catholic King James the Second from the throne and put his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, the Dutch Prince William of Orange on it. The new regime needed new coins. These are a representation of royal authority and royal power even back then.

Still for a lot of people in rural area, is the only sort of representation that they would have of the monarchy. You want to have this image of authority coming across by your coinage, not you don't. You don't want to be represented at home and abroad by a coinage that is it's such poor condition that you can barely stand musta. But it wasn't just about how things looked again, the coin is the representation of the monarch. If it's busted, folks might start one, or if the

monarchy is busted too. If you go boil it back down to the basics, think about what a coin is and why we actually have any designs on a coin at all. The design is on there to show that this piece of metal, this this piece of silver is of a given value, in a given weight, and as royal approval. You know it's got the seal of Royalty on it. Therefore you know you can trust it, and you know you can accept it. And this gets us to the heart of what a currency really is. Trust.

It's an agreement at this moment in history, it's an agreement that this shilling weighs this amount of silver because the king or queen really Parliament says it does. The marks on the coins were a shorthand for the value they represented, but also represented the authority that guaranteed that value. So if the people don't trust the currency, if the people can't agree that this penny is worth a dish of coffee, then the people have a problem and the

government has an even bigger problem. This is also why the punishment for counterfeiting or clipping was so severe, public disemboweling and head on a spike severe. These were socially and economically destabilizing crimes that hacked at the authority of the government. In William Lowndes, the Secretary of the Treasury, wrote to the country's brightest thinkers to ask them what to do, including Isaac Newton, who was still lecturing to

the walls up in Cambridge. Economics as a discipline hadn't really been invented yet, so Lowndes was casting his net pretty wide for solutions. Newton, like pretty much everyone else, had the same answer. Recall all the old bad coins, make them no longer legal tender, and remnt them duh. Newton also suggested that the Treasury make the intrinsic and extrinsic values of the money the same. The intrinsic value of the coin was its value on the market. The

extrinsic was the face you. By making those the same and reducing the silver content and devaluing the currency in the short term, it would keep people from being able to make money off melting it down and selling it in another market. The Parliament didn't agree to that kind of currency manipulation, although they probably should have. You go

too far, Newton too far? Anyway, it shouldn't have taken Newton, philosopher, John Locke, architects or Christopher Wren, East India Company governor, Sir Josiah Child, and a bunch of other prominent people to convince Parliament, but it sort of did. In late Parliament finally agreed. So gone are all these medieval thin pieces, and we've instead of replaced with you know, shiny, new thick,

machine struck coins that look magnificent. That's that's what they decided to go for with the great recoinage of It was going to be expensive, very expensive, because of how degraded the coinage was. It would take three old coins to make two new coins. The treasury would need to make up that lost silver from somewhere, and it's not like England had a ton of silver mines kicking around. Not to mention, England was also broke, like invent the

national debt broke, but more on that later. In addition to fighting an expensive war with France, one of the knock on effects of the silver shortage was that people tended to pay their taxes in bad coin. This meant that the treasury was being shorted, taking in coin that didn't weigh as much as its face value said it did, and therefore wasn't worth as much. But the recoinage was the only way to stop the loss of silver from

the country. Confound the coiners and clippers, William Shalloner among them, and shore up the country's fledgling financial institutions. Parliament passed the Recoinage Act on January and the melting commenced the very next day. But if anyone thought that this whole thing was going to be easy, and based on the way Newton was offered the Warden Gig, at least some people did well. Nothing considerable coined of the new and now only current stamp. Of course, such a scarcity that

tumults are everyday feared. Join me next time on Newton's Law to find out exactly how Isaac Newton, that prickly genius saved England. Basically. Newton's Law is a production of I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me Linda Rodriguez mccrobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer is Emily Marinoff. Our executive producer is Jason English. Original music by Alice McCoy with editing help from Mary Do, Sound design and mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research in fact

checking by me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice act being in this episode by Robbie Jack. Special thanks to Chris Barker. Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur and Fineflex Sound Studios. Our show logo is designed by Lucy Condania. Thanks for listening, Thank you, Emily. Bye.