CHAPTER 8
Making Money

The Tower also served as the mint—the place where the country’s money was made. It was sensible to put the mint in the Tower of London. Coins were made of gold and silver. It was a good idea to keep all that precious metal in a very safe place while it was waiting to be made into coins.

Making coins was hard work. First the metal was melted and made into round, flat discs. Then a man put the blank disc on top of a die. This was a kind of mold with a picture carved on it. He put another carved die on top of the blank disc. Then another man hit the stack with a hammer, hard enough to drive an impression of the pictures into the metal.

It was important to be sure that all the coins were made with exactly the right amount of gold or silver. So every year, there was a trial. It was just like any other trial, with a courtroom and a judge. But the defendant that was being tried was the coins, not a person. The case was decided by a jury made up of experts in metal, who tested the coins’ weight. This trial still goes on today.

King Henry VIII spent a lot of money, so he needed more coins to be made. He decided to make coins out of copper, coated with silver or gold. The coins would still be worth the same amount that they had been before. But it would take less precious metal to make them, so the king could make more coins from the same amount of silver or gold. All the coins had Henry’s picture stamped on them. After they were in use for a while, the precious metal rubbed off and showed the copper underneath. So people gave Henry the nickname “Old Copper Nose.”

English coins were very thin, and the edges weren’t perfectly even. People used to clip tiny bits of silver off the edges and save them up. When they had enough silver, they would melt it down to create a fake new coin. Clipping coins was a serious crime.

In the 1660s, the mint started to use machines to make the coins. This was faster and easier. It also meant the edges of the coins were more even. The thin edges could be covered with a pattern of little grooves. That way no one could clip the edges off without it being noticed. Special edge-making machines were used. Everyone who worked in the mint had to swear not to tell anyone how these machines worked. That way, no one could make fake coins.

Sir Isaac Newton

The king had all the old coins in the country returned to the mint and remade into new ones. This complicated work was overseen by Sir Isaac Newton. Newton is famous as one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. But for many years he was also the head of the mint.

The mint stayed at the Tower until 1810. Then it needed more space, so it was moved to Tower Hill, just outside the Tower.