

CURRENCY. 



possible for the force of government to give a fictitious value to 

 a legal currency, and, if the currency of any country is slightly 

 affected by the foreign exchanges, that the purchasing power of 

 money, though it may be greatly lowered in the exchange, will 

 suffer an unimportant, or even inappreciable reduction at home. 

 But during the fifteenth century this country was very little 

 influenced by the foreign exchanges. Public and private docu- 

 ments, acts of Parliament, and the comments of such writers 

 as Gascoigne show that the currency was greatly lessened 

 by the perpetual transmission of specie to the Roman court. 

 Their complaint is that the country is denuded of its wealth 

 by a perpetually adverse balance of trade, chiefly due to the 

 collections made by Papal agents on ordinary or extraordinary 

 occasions. But it is clear that, foreign trade existing, no 

 precaution which any government could adopt would have 

 prevented the immediate exportation of all the old money in 

 England when, for instance in 1412, the quantity of silver in 

 a given amount, which had stood at the proportion of 2*325, 

 was reduced instantly to 1*937. 



I suggested more than once in my earlier volumes that 

 payments were made by weight, up to the time when Elizabe 

 restored the currency, and that subsequently, a perfectly new 

 departure being made, the custom of receiving sums by tale, 

 though it must have seriously affected the recipients of fixed 

 rents, became habitual, because for seventeen years the country 

 had been plagued with a base money, the intrinsic value of 

 which was less than even that third in which, speaking generally, 

 the new currency stood to that of the older Plantagenet kings. 

 I did not pretend to affirm this theory positively, nor do I still, 

 even though I have a far larger array of facts than I had when 

 I first promulgated the hypothesis, and I must postpone a part 

 of the evidence which I wish to put before my readers till I 

 come to the general estimate of prices in the sixteenth century 

 in a later part of this volume, but in the interval I may call 

 my reader's attention to the following. 



i. After the issue of the base money, and markedly after the 



