24 BALCH— THE LAW OF ORESME, fApril 23, 



The luminous treatise of Oresme on money opened the eyes of 

 King Charles to the disastrous results to a country whose govern- 

 ment attempted to alter the basic value of its currency. As regent 

 of France during the captivity by the English of his father, King 

 John the Second, who was captured at Poitiers in 1356, Charles 

 had not escaped the prevailing custom among rulers of that epoch 

 to fill the royal purse by debasing the coins of the realm. In the 

 previous century the great ordinance of 1255, which the States Gen- 

 erals of France, assembled at Paris, obtained from the king, Louis 

 the Ninth, promised sound and stable money for the whole kingdom 

 of France, so that the mark of silver should never produce more 

 than six Ikre tournois. This royal promise was broken again and 

 again by the French sovereigns, and Due Charles, as regent for his 

 captive father, said the value of the mark should be worth twelve 

 livre tournois. This cutting in half of the measure of value was 

 the signal for the great rising at Paris in 1357 under Etienne Marcel, 

 the Prevost of the Paris merchants, and it was with difficulty that 

 the regent reasserted the royal authority in the city.^ The dis- 

 tracted and poverty-stricken state of the people and the low ebb of 

 the kingly power, reen forced by his practical experiences as regent, 

 caused Charles the Wise, though of a physique so frail that he could 

 not march at the head of his army in those years of strife and peril, 

 yet endowed with a superior mind and seeking the advice of sage 

 advisers, to set himself to reorganize the finances of France. The 

 luminous thoughts expressed in the treatise of Oresme he made his 

 own, and during his reign the weight of the gold currency remained 

 a fixed and unchanged quantity, and that of silver was but very 

 triflingly altered. The resulting stability in the value of money, 

 the measure of commercial exchange, reestablished the regularity 

 of commercial transactions, and furnished an important element to 

 public prosperity. The resources of the realm augmented and with 

 them the power of King Charles grew. To honor the scholar who 

 had made plain the confusion that resulted from tampering with the 

 standard of value, the money of the realm. King Charles had Oresme 

 elected in 1377 Count Bishop of Lisieux in Normandy. And it 

 was there, two years after the king's death in 1380, that the great 



= Wolowski. 



