Episode 3: Mint Condition

always so humble mm hmm. Now England hath been more grieved with clipped and counterfeit money than any other country, for want of proper laws to prevent the same, and by the abuse of the mintors of our money, who have made the coin with so little art and ingenuity, that any may clip or counterfeit money without much difficulty, that it may be presumed the old money in this kingdom is now worth two thirds of the intrinsic value.

But if there be not a stop put to clipping of money, it will in a few years be so diminished and counterfeited that it will not be worth half the value it was coined for. Challoner was some forty years later sounding a lot like Monsieur Blonde, And of course he wasn't wrong about the coins, because not much had changed since the sixteen fifties, despite the introduction of

the machines. Remember, the Treasury never recalled all the old coins. Now, we know that Challoner was more qualified and most to talk about clipping and counterfeiting, But why would he start offering tips on how to put himself out of business? Was chunder going legit using his ill gotten knowledge for the betterment of the kingdom. Not quite. This was something

bigger than making fake coins and sneakier. Now, the money being such bad workmanship every smith, clockmaker, brazier, goldsmith, et cetera, and grave stamps, and the work being so flat and irregular they can stamp money with a hammer of three pound weight, which is a great grievance to the Kingdom to have our money coins so disingenuously that it may be counterfeited with so much ease. This was a good suggestion, so good that the Mint was pretty much already in

possession of such a machine. However, Chaloner also added, like everyone else, that the Treasury needed to recall all the old coins, melt them down and re mint them. Chaloner also made a few other suggestions, some practical and some us so. For example, he proposed that the Mint go on the road, travel from county to county, to allow the rich and the poor like to trade in their

coins without fear of being robbed or missing out. Parliament was not going to go for any of it, really, after all, who was this William Chaloner anyway is the son of a Warwickshire weaver. But Chaloner didn't care whether his suggestions were actually adopted. What Chaloner wanted was to be noticed. It was just possible, or just becoming possible, for smart people with things to say to get attention from powerful people through the new medium of the press.

Have you read the ideas of this chileon? Yes, I am immensely interested in his proposals. Maybe we should put them to the test. I would be going to speak doing further on the subject. A moveablement would be too great a charge to the King and treasure. But we must do something about the counterfeits. Indeed, Mrs William Chaloner

speaks since and there's schools at the mint. Having the merest idea of how they curved the clippup and coins will sink us All Challenger and figured out that he could use pamphlets as a way to manufacture himself a reputation as an expert, to make a name for himself not only among the criminal classes, and this he thought could get him what he really wanted and in at the Mint, a way to waltz through the front door

and get a close up look at its operations. Challoner summed up his proposal by offering to show Parliament some exemplary pieces of coin my own design, to demonstrate how money can be coined so that it shall be impossible wolf for any private person to counterfeit it. And he offered to do it at the Mint for I Heart Radio. I'm Linda Rodriguez mccrabbie and this is Newton's Law and I Heart original podcast Episode three. Mint Condition you are

making Act one. They're not so great re Coinage. William Challoner's proposals didn't get him into the Mint yet, but his recommendation to recall and recoin, now that was something everyone knew had to be done, and by late Parliament knew it too. The Great Recoinage, as it was later called, started on January and it was meant to be wrapped up in a few months. Most of the time, the mints were seasonal. If that the men who worked at them tended to be farm laborers who were called up

for duty when the mint decided it needed new coins. This, however, was an all hands on deck situation in order to meet the demands of the incredibly ambitious, certainly foolish schedule imposed by Parliament. Work at the mint started at four am and didn't stop until midnight every day except Sunday.

But if you're a picture during a tidy assembly line style operation, don't Yes, it's not a modern manufacturing process as we understand it today, so don't think of a um, you know, production line process where you might start at one end of the mint and neatly work your way around. That's Chris Barker, historian at the modern Royal Mint. It's a very hiddle dey piddled arrangement. So you may well have melting at one end and then you move your casted strip down to another end of the mint, so

it's a little bit here, there and everywhere. And this was on machines that were now more than thirty years old, in a workshop that had been in use since the thirteenth century, and all of that manufacturing took place in

the town. So if you can imagine the situation you would you would have if you were a visit to, say, walking into the raw Mint in the Tower of London, you'd walk into a very narrow, cramped, confined alley way which is flanked on either side by wooden buildings, many even sort of crazed with age, often falling to pieces, and you've got to count them literally propped up with timber and sort of bolted together with big eye bolts

and fall into parts. It's very ramshackle institution. Um by this point in history, nearly three d workmen, nine presses, and ten million machines, as well as the three large furnaces were crammed into this ramshackle institution, which was not more than a hundred feet at its widest, and that's not even counting the horses. Some of the rolling machines, which flattened the sheets of metal to the right thickness to be punched into blanks, relied on horsepower to turn

their incredible weight. There could be as many as twelve horses in the workshop at any given moment. Over the roughly two years of the recoinage, the Mint spent nearly seven hundred pounds as an actual money in hauling manure away that's a hundred and thirty five thousand pounds in today's money. That was at the Tower Mint, the maintment

in the country. But to facilitate bringing in old coins in places far from London and to up production on making new ones, the Mint had established temporary operations in Bristol, Chester, Exeter, Norwich and York, but none of it the long days. The horse manure of the temporary mints was enough. Things were not going well at all to begin with. The man in charge of the recoinage was a guy called

Thomas Neil. He was known as Golden Neil after his extremely advantageous match to England's richest widow, a woman with an estate valued at a hundred and twenty thousand pounds. Neil was the Master of the Mint, one of the three officers along with the warden and the Controller who ran the Mint. But he was meant to be the one making this huge undertaking happen, and Neil was, in a word, useless. It's a recoinage is not doing well

at all. It must be somebody else's fault. Neil was one of those rich guys who just kept failing upwards with the help of his powerful contacts. He was the groom of the bed chamber for Charles the Second, James the Second, and William the Third, a role that basically meant that he helped the king, whichever one it was, get dressed and referee as card games. He'd been Master of the Mint since six eighties six, but he was a terrible administrator who had done very little to plan

for the recoinage. Neil was not a good Master of the Mint. I mean he was not involved in in then any you know, in a day to day basis. He's the man who ran up ginormous debts and was not really concerned generally from from the Mint point of view. So it was his assistant, the Deputy Master, a French Hugueno called Dr John Francis Faquier, who did the business and stuff while Neil did other things. Ran the North American Postal Service, or rather had a deputy who actually

lived in the colonies do it. Speculated on housing developments Neil Street. That has a nice ring to it. Trying to invent cheap proof dice, raised shipwrecks, stuff like that. Who the fun I leave it to you? You consorted right. Facua did his best, But there weren't enough men, and the machines were all old, and there weren't enough of them either. The mints were not producing coin quickly enough to meet demand, and the country was in actual danger

of running out of legal physical money. This problem was compounded by the fact that the mechanism of the government put in place for allowing people to trade in their old coins for new ones was not so good. They say, for a given period of time, we will take coins at their face value, regardless of how badly worn or

degreat they are. So if you present something that you can see is a shilling but has lost half its weight, and it's you know, batted and barely legible, the official will still take it a shillings value, even though there's only half a shilling's worth of silver there. But this system was somewhat narrow. Only people who paid direct taxes or made loans to the government were allowed to trade

cliped or debased money in for face value. The trade in also only lasted five months, and that means that those are in the know, those in the urban areas who can really get onto this can make a huge profit because you can gather a selection of very battered coins which only have minimal silver value, tender them in

and actually get the full face value for them. The people that suffer are those in the isolated areas, those who are more remote and more rural, who cannot get all this old coinage that they might have available to the exchange in time in order to benefit from this, because after a certain time you don't get that full face value. Instead you just left with the weight of the coinage. Within six months people had to sell their old coins at weight, meaning that their coins had suddenly

lost as much as half of their value. By this time, there wasn't enough re legal coin in circulation to pay for the expenses of daily life. Here's writer John Evelyn's diary entry from May. Money still continuing exceeding scarce, so the done was paid or received, but all was on trust, the mint not supplying for common necessities. Things were still

bad a month later. Want of current money to carry on the smallest concerns even for daily provisions in the markets guineas lowered to twenty two shillings and great sums daily transported to Holland, where at yields more with other

treasures sent to pay the armies. And so imprudent was the late Parliament to condemn the old though clipped and corrupted till they had provided supplies to this at the fraud of the bankers and goldsmiths, who, having gotten immense riches by extortion, keep up their treasure in expectation of enhancing its value. The mint, Underneil's very hands off leadership, was floundering. Nothing considerable coined of the new and now

only current stamp. Of course, such a scarcity that tumults every day feed that there wasn't enough coin was bad for wealthier people like John Evelyn, but again it was much worse for the poor. Another contemporary observer wrote in a private letter that the people are discontented to the utmost, adding that many self murders were happening owing to the want, and it was starting to look pretty bleak for the

government as well. For one thing, the want that drove people to kill themselves might just as easily drive them to rage and riot. These were and are the conditions that lead to revolution, and in fact, at least one town saw people arrested for rioting after attack. Collector refused to take the old coins, but what else were they going to pay with? And that's the other thing. When the people can't pay rent or taxes, the government's coffers

start to empty. This government was already in trouble, so the sudden lack of revenue made things that much worse. Soldiers in some parts of the country were being paid in provisions because there wasn't enough coin to pay them in real money. Mutinous grumblings added to the tumult, and everyone started squinting at the King and Queen suspiciously. If Isaac Newton had wanted an easy gig, he had become Warden of the Royal Mint at exactly the wrong time

Act two. Out with the Old in with the Newton. To put it diccinctly, the Mint was a shambles, a mess that was threatening to undermine the economy, the new monarchy, the country's fragile financial institutions, everything. And when he was confronted with this mess, Warden Isaac Newton didn't do what Master Neil had done, and he didn't do what every other warden had done, which was basically nothing. A Newson could have done that. But Newson was not that sort

of puss. That's Dr Patricia Farah, Cambridge historian and Newton expert. He went in the very energetically and decided he was going to overhaul the system and make it work properly. And he was a very very dedicated, systematic, organized manager. Newton rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He was,

as one biographer later said, a born administrator. Thomas Fowl, a clerk at the Mint, actually wrote to Newton to tell him that he was the first wordens since at least sixteen seventy two who didn't treat the post as a signic cure. If I may be so bold to say, we shall find you fair to exceed the rest for the gooden privileges of the Mint, more than all your predecessors. Foul also spent the majority of this letter explaining all

the ways that the previous wardens had disappointed. Sir Anthonys and Ledger, then warden of the Mint, came very seldom to the place, and did not anything of service more than to come and ask how the affairs of the Mint were, And that was all, and so went his way foul might have been trying to get on Newton's good side, certainly, but Charles Montague, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who gave Newton the job, later said that the

recoinage couldn't have happened without him. Nietzsan was absolutely meticulous in everything that he did. He was a very thorough man. It seems that all the energy he put into making observations of the stars or holding the dates of ancient events that happened thousands of years ago, he turned all that energy into making sure that the mint was rung as efficiently as the microscope had only really just been invented, but Newton was putting the mints operations under it. Metaphorically speaking.

Newton researched the history of the mint going back two hundred years. He went through decades of accounting books, making notes in the margins. He was an obsessive copier. He could have had his assistance copied down all the meeting notes, all his letters and correspondence with the Treasury and others, but he did it himself. Haines, bring the records. I want all the receipts and accounting books and the warrants.

This meant that Newton was aware of all the mints business, so much so that he knew who was trying to get one over on the Mint, as the Treasury already paid the cop For example, he told the Treasury not to pay the carpenters until the quality of their work was checked. We are humbly off opinion that the work done by the carpenter and the rest of the workman ought to be surveyed and valued before their whole bills

are paid off. Another time, he kept the Mint from signing a contract with some metal dealers who had offered to take over the recoinage at a very steep markup. These goldsmiths want how much preposterous? From my observations, the Mint can do for at least a third less than these Charlatan's propose. Golden Neil has made a mess of this mood that he was spending his wife's money and not the Treasury. Is within a month and a half on the job, Newton had shouldered useless Neil out of

the way and was basically doing his job too. We are in the business of making money, not spending it needlessly. Newton knew that in order for the Mint to meet the demands of the Treasury. Some things, a lot of things had to change. If you can keep reason above passion, that and watchfulness will be your best defendants. Newton saw that the machines were producing a maximum of fifteen thousand pounds of coin a week. The treasury wanted thirty pounds

of coin a week. This was a mass problem. Newton calculated that he'd need two new smelting furnaces, eight new rolling mills, and five new coining presses. This sort of empirical data collection, this was what Newton was really really

good at. For example, as Thomas Levinson noted in his book Newton in the Counterfeiter, Newton realized that a new melting pot could hold eight hundred pounds of silver metal, but within six weeks that capacity was reduced to just six and fifty pounds because the pot actually got smaller as the silver codd it. This effected the output and the number of coins that could be produced, so Newton determined that a part was only good for about a

hundred and twenty meltings. Newton cast his eye around the workshop looking for more inefficiencies. There is also a waste in the milling by the dripping off off the sand with some particles of silver, and by some blanks falling out of the pan upon the half and shreds of silver lost in the dust, or by sticking to the

workman's shoes. Then he turned to the men themselves. One of the things that he did was to institute what we would call time and motion studies, and he watched all the people working, and he insisted that they should work far, far faster to make the work more efficient. Newton calculated the rate at which mint workers could turn

out coins. Two mills with four millers, twelve horses, two horsekeepers, three cutters, two flatters, eight sizes, one kneeler, three blanches, too markers to press his with fourteen laborers to pull at them, can coin three thousand pounds up money per diam. Newton said, the men operating the press needed to produce fifty to fifty five coins a minute in order to make three thou pounds of coin a day. That's almost a coin every second. That's fast. It is physically demanding.

And the four gentlemen who are pulling on the on the ropes as part of the screw press, and there's the demands as such that they can only operate in shifts of fifteen minutes before they're exhausted. So they're doing fifteen minutes on they'll swap out. Four more people come in fifteen minutes, and so they're constantly swapping in and out.

This does not make Newton popular with his new staff. Unsurprisingly, all the staff disliked him because he made the work at a far higher rate, since he got rid of all the little private practices where people were making money on the site. So he was a very very efficient manager. He was also a ruthless manage I don't think Newton was particularly well liked at all, if I'm honest. I mean there are there are accounts of people who get

on with him. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't. He was not disliked by everybody, but there was also a lot of people he rubbed up the wrong way. I think he's probably one of those individuals where if he took a disliking to you, that was it. No matter what you did, no matter what you could do, you've had it. Newton's efforts and indifference to the opinions of his staff paid off. Between sixteen ninety six and seventeen hundred, The value of the silver struck by the Mint was

more than five point one million pounds. That was about two million pounds more than had been made in the previous thirty five years put together, and more importantly, by September sixteen ninety six, silver coin was again flowing through the veins of the country's economy. There were no major riots, no revolution, and both the King and Queen kept their heads. Newton thought he deserved a raise, or at least as

much as Neil was getting, for being master. The salary of the warden of his Majesty's Mint is only four pound per annum, with a house where forty pound per annum, and his purposes are only three pound twelve shillings per annum for call, all which taxes being deducted. Is so small in respect of the salaries and purposes of the other officers of the Mint, as suffices not to support

the authority of his office. It seems that Newton got that raise, But there was still another problem facing the Mint, and this one wasn't something Newton could solve through a time and motion study. This was a problem that would, at least for a while, consume the majority of Newton's time as warden bringing clippers and counterfeiters to justice, and it was a part of Newton's job that he was not happy about at all. Nor is there any reward

or encouragement appointing for my service in these matters? Nor am I provided with any competent assistance to enable me to grapple with an undertaking soul vac sastious and dangerous? Is this coming up on Newton's Law? We know by now that this most vexatious counterfeiter, William Chaloner, is no run of the mill coiner, So how will his play for the mint itself turn out? The Mint is either incompetent or corrupt or both. Newton's Law is a production

of I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me Linda Rodriguez McRobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our producer is Emily Marina. 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 acting by Keith Fleming, Mark McDonald and Robert Jack. Special thanks to Chris Barker and Dr Patricia Farrell. Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur and

Fineflex Sound Studios. Our show logo is designed by Lucy Continia. Thanks for listening, Bloodio