Technology
Our model identifies economically significant features of the technology of coin production, including ones that govern the costs of entering the business of producing counterfeits. This chapter is about technologies for producing coins. We describe the constituent metals of coins and the methods and machines available for making them. Three major technologies produced coins: (1) the hammer and pile, which prevailed from the beginning until at least 1550; (2) the screw press and the cylinder press, which were available after 1550; and (3) Boulton’s steam press, which became available after 1787. Later chapters describe how technological innovations joined with advances in monetary theory to inspire new policies for supplying coins.
Small coins in the Middle Ages
We begin our story around A.D. 800, when Charlemagne claimed the title of “Emperor” for himself.1 Among his many reforms was establishing a uniform coinage throughout his vast dominions in 794. The silver penny was the only coin minted. It was made of 96% silver and contained about 1.7g of pure metal (see fig. 4.1).
From 794 to about 1200, western Europe relied on the penny as its only denomination of coin. However, the rapid disintegration of central authority during that time let feudal lords, bishops, and cities assume the right to mint coins without oversight. Each fief or city had its own penny, and these coins were minted with progressively less silver, at rates that varied from place to place. By 1160, European pennies contained anywhere from England’s 1.3g to Venice’s 0.05g of fine silver, with fineness ranging from 92.5% in England to 20% in Barcelona (Spufford 1988a, 102–3).
Figure 4.1 A penny of Charlemagne, minted in Melle. (Author’s collection). Photograph: Robert Lifson.
Yet everywhere in Europe the penny was the only coin at any given location; large quantities of pennies were counted in dozens, called “shillings,” and sets of twenty dozens, called “pounds.”2
For the following four hundred years, from 1200 to 1600, European monetary systems consisted of multiple denominations, with the penny (1d.) as the lowest, or one of the lowest.3 Larger silver coins and gold coins, introduced in the mid-thirteenth century, formed the large denominations.
In medieval times, small change was made from a mixture of silver and copper. When the share of silver, or fineness, was low (markedly less than 50%), it was called billon. In England, the small change was made from sterling silver (92.5%), the same standard as larger denominations. The royal mint never minted below sterling (92.5%) until 1672.4
In other countries, silver was mixed with copper to create larger, more convenient coins, but the silver content of the lower denominations was nevertheless proportional to their face value, as compared to larger coins. This was true in France until the mid-sixteenth century. When debasements occurred in medieval times, the entire denomination structure was debased simultaneously. During periods of intense debasement (1340–60, 1417–29) no small coins were minted. Originally, small coins were under the same free minting regime as larger coins, but by the 1480s, small denominations were minted only on government orders, and sometimes in specific regions, prohibitions were even placed on minting.
In addition to silver and full-bodied billon coins, other coins were “light” relative to higher denominations, usually by no more than 10 or 20%. Examples are found in Spain, the Low Countries, and Italy. When the quattrino (4d.) was first minted in Florence in 1332, it was lighter than the grosso (30d.), in the sense that it contained less than 
of a grosso’s silver, by about 17%. During debasements, relative contents could change. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, the three silver coins were the grosso, the quattrino, and the picciolo (1d.). In 1366, only the picciolo was debased; in 1371, the quattrino was debased; in 1385 and in 1461, the grosso was debased; in 1472 the quattrino and the picciolo were both debased.5
The purchasing power of a small coin
What was small change as a fraction of income? Munro (1988, 393) provides detailed information on the purchasing power of the Flemish penny, and concludes that “small silver and petty coins played a far greater role in medieval society than they do in today’s economy. For most people, such coins were then certainly the principal means, for many the only means, of transacting retail trade, in buying and selling daily necessities.”
Table 4.1 Daily wage for unskilled labor and denomination structure of coinage in late medieval Europe. Denominations of billon coins are in smaller font, those of silver coins in normal font, those of gold coins in italics. Units are the local pence (deniers parisis for Flanders; maravedis for Castile).
| Place and time | Daily wage | Existing denominations |
| Paris, 1402 | 30d. | ½, 1, 2, 5, 10, 270 |
| Paris, 1460 | 35d. | 1, 3, 10, 30, 330 |
| Florence, 1347 | 30d. | 1, 4, 32, 48, 744 |
| Flanders, 1389 | 48d. | ½, 1, 24, 528 |
| Low Countries, 1433 | 60d. | ½, 1, 3, 6, 12, 24, 288, 576 |
| England, 1349 | 2.2d. | ¼, ½,1, 20, 40, 80 |
| England, 1467 | 5d. | ¼, ½, 1, 2, 4, 30, 60, 120 |
| Castile, 1471 | 25mr | ¼, ½, 2, 31, 420 |
Sources: France: Baulant (1971). Florence: La Roncière (1982, 326). Flanders, Low Countries: Verlinden (1959–73, 2:95, 4:325). England: Postan (1973, 199). Castile: MacKay (1981, 76–77, 151).
Table 4.1 compares the denomination structure with the daily wage of unskilled labor at various dates in western Europe. Typically, the daily wage represented 1 to 3 silver coins, and thus daily necessities required smaller coins. Another way to appreciate its role is to estimate what the smallest silver coin could purchase. In Florence, in the second half of the fourteenth century, the smallest silver coin was the grosso (5s.): it could purchase 5 liters of the cheapest wine, 1 kg of mutton, 20 eggs, or 1 kg of olive oil; or pay a month’s rent for an unmarried manual laborer (La Roncière 1982, 394–95).
The medieval technology: hammer and pile
Most mints were contracted out to private entrepreneurs who were usually allowed different charges for different denominations.6
Figure 4.2 A late medieval mint, engraving by Leonard Beck (1516). Source: Hans Burgkmair, der WeißKunig, reprint Vienna 1775. (Photograph courtesy of the John M. Wing foundation, the Newberry Library, Chicago.)
After melting and refining the metal, the technology for making coins involved three main steps: preparing sheets of metal, cutting the sheets into blanks, and striking the blanks. Figure 4.2 represents the future German emperor Maximilian observing a technology that was little changed from Greek and Roman times.7 The metal, once brought to the desired standard in the furnaces (at top left of fig. 4.2), was hammered into a sheet (at center). A sizer cut the sheet into squares with shears, then beat the squares to a round shape and adjusted the weight (at left). The resulting blanks were blanched to remove tarnish, and then struck by the moneyers (at right). To do this, the lower die or pile, whose other end was shaped like a spike, was driven into a wooden block. The moneyer put the block between his legs, placed a blank on the pile, placed the upper die or trussell on top of the blank, and struck the top of the trussell several times with a hammer.
The dies were made locally by the mint’s engraver on a pattern provided by the central government. The engraver prepared a collection of punches, each bearing in relief one of the elements of the coin’s design. He then used the punches to engrave the dies with the design, replacing them as they wore out.
The technology required specialized labor: each step was performed by different laborers, usually members of privileged (and hereditary) corporations. The tools were simple, the plant was of limited size (furnaces were the largest piece of equipment), and minting could be carried out in a decentralized fashion. But this technology had serious drawbacks. Since dies were produced locally, with common goldsmith’s tools, there was considerable variation in the style and quality of the imprints on the coins. The process produced imperfect coins of varying size and weight, with a poorly centered imprint, making it difficult to spot an altered coin. An imitation could pass as genuine. The coins were thus subject to falsification and clipping.
Production costs and seigniorage
Per unit of value, the production process made small coins more expensive to produce than larger ones, since the same effort was required to strike a coin of any size, and not much less to prepare smaller blanks than larger blanks. Table 4.2 presents data on production costs from a variety of western European countries in the Middle Ages.8 Who paid those costs varied by country, depending on mint prices set for each denomination.
Table 4.2 Production costs (brassage) of coinage in late medieval Europe. Gold coins are in italics. Legal values are in local pence (maravedis in Castile).
Sources: Milan: Cipolla (1990, 111–23). Florence: Bernocchi (1976, 33–44). Castile: Pérez García (1990, 83–86) and MacKay (1981, 76). France: Saulcy (1879–92, 2:117, 3:226). England: Challis (1992a, 703, 713). Low Countries: Munro (1972, 202–5) and Munro (1988, table 5).
The difference between the mint price and the mint equivalent of each denomination constituted gross seigniorage. Production costs were called brassage. Given that brassage varied by denomination, an identical mint price across denominations required either cross-subsidization of lower denominations by higher ones, or subsidization of the mint by the government.
In Florence, whose mint was run directly by the city, the opposite tack was taken, namely, charging private parties for costs by paying different mint prices for different denominations. In 1347 (the period for which the figures in table 4.2 apply), the seigniorage rate was 0.6% for the gold fiorino or florin, 4.6% for the grosso, 6.6% for the quattrino and 17.8% for the picciolo (Bernocchi 1976, 38–40).
In France and the Netherlands, the mint price was the same regardless of denomination, but the mintmaster was permitted to deduct different production costs from gross seigniorage.9 Thus the net seigniorage on the larger coins was used to subsidize the production costs of the smaller coins. Furthermore, the output mix between gold and silver was often part of the mint’s contract, but only the aggregate value actually mattered, and quantities of small currency were never specified, leaving them to be determined by public demand and the mintmaster’s decisions. The mintmaster’s only obligation was to provide a minimal amount of net seigniorage during his lease. Since he could meet his obligation with any mix of coins, he preferred to mint larger denomination silver coins, unless ordered to do otherwise.
In England, after 1351, the mint price did not depend on denomination, but the mintmaster was allowed a flat rate for all coins of the same metal. This gave the mintmaster an incentive to produce only the largest coins. Occasionally, the proportions of various coins were specified in the contract, but the king could not force a competitive bidder to assume such costs. In 1461, the mix of denominations was left to the discretion of the comptroller, a government official, who should consult “the desire, ease, and content of the People.” Production remained strongly biased toward large coins until a complete scale of differential payments across denominations was adopted in 1770.10
Mechanization
Innovations came from the art of medal making, which began in Italy in the 1430s.11 Often much larger than coins, medals were usually cast and eventually chiseled, but around the turn of the sixteenth century the demand for high-quality medals increased and people sought new ways to strike medals.12 This required a mechanized technology both to prepare the larger flanks and to strike them with sufficient force and accuracy. Ultimately, the key innovations occurred among goldsmiths of southern Germany and Switzerland around 1550. They quickly disseminated throughout Europe.13 Two methods of striking the coins developed: one using a screw press as in figure 4.3, the other using two cylinders on which the dies were engraved, thus laminating and striking at the same time. The screw press came to be adopted in France and England in the seventeenth century, while the cylinder press was adopted earlier in Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Sweden. In the eighteenth century, the screw press overtook the cylinder press as the main minting apparatus.
The next sections discuss the diffusion of the two technologies across Europe. Some countries experimented with both. In the following chapters, we examine the impact made by both methods on governments’ policies regarding small coinage, and the experiments that were undertaken in the seventeenth century.
The screw press
In 1547, the French king Henri II decided to reform coinage in his realm. He appointed an engraver-general to produce all the punches for making dies in all mints and so brought greater uniformity to realizations of the designs. He also asked his envoys in all countries to report new technologies that could be put to use to produce better coinage. In 1550, he learned from his ambassador in Germany that an Augsburg goldsmith had perfected equipment to produce high-quality coins.14 The ambassador’s brother was sent along with an engineer named Aubin Olivier to Germany. They negotiated the rights to the machines and had them built in Augsburg and brought to Paris. The machinery was set up in a building on the Île de la Cité in Paris, where a water mill had been installed in the 1530s for gem polishing.15 The Mill Mint (Monnaie du Moulin des Étuves) began producing gold coins in 1551, and Olivier became its director in 1556. A rolling mill (powered by the water mill) created smooth strips of metal or fillets; a drawing bench brought them to the exact width; a hand-activated cutter or punch press perforated the strips into blanks; and a press struck the blanks on both sides. By 1555, Olivier had improved the press by adding a segmented collar to hold the blank in place. During the strike, the collar impressed on the edge of the coin a design or a motto (the collar had to be segmented so as to remove the coin after the strike). The new machines thus mechanized each step in coin making, and also marked the edges to prevent clipping.
We do not know whether the original Augsburg machinery used a traditional drop press, where a weight falls vertically on top of the blank, or a real screw press like the one depicted in figure 4.3.16 But by the mid-seventeenth century, the screw press was well developed: its first known depiction is on a painted window in the Constanz mint in 1624. It gained its force from the momentum of two large lead balls (weighing 40 to 150 lb each) at the extremities of a horizontal bar. At the time of its installation in London in 1662, it could strike 30 coins per minute. By the late eighteenth century, the removal of struck coins and feeding of new blanks had been automated; the Paris press took 16 men to operate and could produce 60 coins per minute.17
The new mint set up at the Mill Mint did not long function as coinage mint, however, because of the high costs of operation, and perhaps some initial mismanagement. In 1563, the Mill Mint was restricted to making medals and tokens. In 1575, its mandate was extended to pure copper coinage. It continued to function in that capacity, producing high-quality medals and small copper coins in limited quantities, until 1625.18 Historians usually attribute the failure to use the mint for coins to the resistance of entrenched interests among mint workers and monetary officials, although problems such as those to be encountered England in the late seventeenth century may have been foreseen.
England became interested in the new process early on, and in 1554 attempted to imitate the French press. In 1561, a former employee of the French mint named Eloi Mestrell came to England and introduced the new technology at the Tower Mint. The machines were ten times slower than the hammering process and the experiment terminated after 11 years.19
Figure 4.3 A screw press, engraving by Robert Benard, 1771. Source: Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des arts, des sciences et des métiers, plates, vol. 8. (Photograph courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.)
In 1630, an engraver from Liège named Jean Warin became director of the Mill Mint, now called the Medal Mint and located in the Louvre Palace. On the occasion of a general overhaul of the French coinage in 1640, he was allowed to try again to use screw presses for minting coins, and in 1645 he succeeded in having the mechanized process used in every French mint. The old technology subsisted only in the coat of arms of the corporation of moneyers (fig. 4.4).
England followed within a few years. In 1649, the Frenchman Pierre Blondeau was invited to England to bring with him the technology: his sample coins were approved in 1651, but the first coins produced with the new method did not appear until 1658. The method was extended to the whole English coinage in 1662. The rolling mills were driven by horses. In his diary for 1663, Samuel Pepys noted that the machinery made coinage more expensive for the king.20 In England, however, no recoinage occurred, and the “milled” money circulated along with the older, hammered money. Chapter 16 describes how England ultimately recoined all of its silver money in 1696.
Figure 4.4 Silver token issued by the mint of Rouen, 1787. The center depicts a screw press. The two hammers in the small oval below recall the previous technology. The Latin motto at the top means “hence weight and value.” (Author’s collection). Photograph: Robert Lifson.
The screw press did not diffuse widely until after its nearly simultaneous adoption in England and France. It was adopted in Brandenburg soon after the peace of Westphalia in 1648, and by the Netherlands in 1671. Spain, where the grandson of the king of France came to the throne in 1700, switched to the screw press in 1728; his son introduced it in Parma, from where it passed to Venice in 1755.21 Though it ultimately proved to be the superior technology, reluctance to make the associated large investments in human and physical capital delayed adoption of the screw press for a hundred years after it first appeared.
The cylinder press
While Henri II of France was actively searching for a new technology, so also was Charles V, German emperor and king of Spain. In 1551, one of his advisors, Count zu Solm-Lich, recommended mechanization to reduce minting costs. He proposed the principle of a cylinder press, similar to the rolling presses already used by goldsmiths, to produce flat strips of metal. The cylinders themselves would be engraved with the coin die (see fig. 4.5). Horses or waterwheels would provide power. The Emperor’s brother Ferdinand, count of Tirol, showed interest and asked his mint officers in the city of Hall to investigate the possibilities.
In the end, the first working cylinder press was set up in Zürich in the early 1550s, by two goldsmiths.22 The mechanism had the advantage of simultaneously laminating and stamping the metal, but punching out the coins after impression was laborious. A variant method fed cut blanks through the cylinder press, but the unequal stretching of the blank as it passed between the rolls resulted in oval and sometimes warped coins, making it impossible to serrate the edges. This could be corrected by cutting oval blanks and engraving oval dies, resulting in round coins. In spite of these drawbacks, the process proved very popular. The Swiss inventors set up a partnership to develop the new invention commercially and export it abroad; they obtained a patent for all of Germany. Ferdinand bought it for Tirol and it was installed in Innsbruck in 1568. Austria would remain faithful to the cylinder press until 1765.
Figure 4.5 Cylinder used in the Segovia mint, 1620. This trial cylinder is engraved with six different designs and was used to produce pattern coins (Museo Casa de la Moneda, Madrid).
The cylinder press was soon adopted throughout Germany and beyond: Heidelberg in 1567, Cologne in 1568, Augsburg in 1572, Dresden in 1574, Danzig in 1577, Nyköping (Sweden) in 1580, Madgeburg in 1582, Hamburg in 1591, Saalfeldt in 1593, Rostock in 1594, Osnabrück in 1597, Münster in 1599. It reached Poland in the late sixteenth century, where the Göbel brothers secured a patent and exported it to Königsberg, Riga, Denmark. Before 1600 it had also reached Clausthal-Zellerfeld in Hannover near the mines of the Harz, Berlin, and Strasbourg. Sweden began using cylinder presses in 1625 in Kopparberg, near its large copper mines.23
A variant of the cylinder press was developed in the seventeenth century. Instead of engraving a whole cylinder, two mushroom-shaped pieces were engraved and inserted in slots of rotating axles. This design, known as Taschenwerk, required precut oval-shaped blanks. Passing them between the dies made them round. The design was introduced in the early seventeenth century in France and England, but did not take root. Nicolas Briot, a mintmaster in northern France and Lorraine, traveled extensively to Germany, where he learned of the various techniques used there. He became engraver of the mint in 1606, and in 1620 obtained the lease for the Paris mint. In 1617, a trial of his proposed minting device was carried out before French officials, but ended in failure: wastage was high and the coins were not of good quality.24 In 1625, he left for England where he became chief engraver of the mint. In 1629, he was allowed to experiment with machinery which he had been using to strike medals. He was also put in charge of producing pure copper coinage at the mint in Edinburgh, but neither attempt proved conclusive. In 1639, he tried again in Scotland with silver coinage. He used a Taschenwerk for large denominations and a screw press for small denominations. The machinery was partly powered by horses. The costs were substantial, and the machines apparently remained experimental. Later, during the Civil War, Briot minted coins for the Royalists using cylinder presses.25
From Germany, the cylinder press technology quickly spread to southern Europe. Venice’s ambassador to the German emperor persuaded the authorities to import it in 1575 (Majer 1953). The following year, Florence installed it in the new Zecca (mint) on the banks of the Arno, near Santa Croce. The machinery was imported from Germany, and operated by German engineers who proved to be excellent workers and consumers of Chianti wine.26 Rome had similar equipment by 1581. That year, Philip II of Spain asked his cousin the archduke Ferdinand, count of Tirol, to send him a copy of the Innsbruck machines, and the archduke obliged by sending six German craftsmen, who built them in the Segovia mint, henceforth known as the Ingenio.27 The first coins, silver reales, were issued in 1586. The installation of this machine in Spain had important consequences which we will trace in chapter 14.
Other inventions
An important innovation during the seventeenth century was the marking of edges of coins with the Castaing machine (invented in England and adopted in France in 1685), a process by which a coin was rolled on a horizontal surface between two steel bars, one of which bore a motto or serrated design in relief.28
Several innovations occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The portrait lathe and hubbing were invented by the Swiss Jean-Pierre Droz around 1780. They allowed coin dies to be identically reproduced, and eliminated one of the last sources of variation from one coin to the next. They were adopted by Dupré, engraver of the French mint, in 1791, and Boulton in Birmingham.
The steam engine
In 1786, Matthew Boulton of Birmingham, partner of James Watt, adapted steampower to the minting press. Private minters first took advantage of the new technology, the Anglesey Copper Company in 1787 soon being followed by many others. Boulton’s main ambition, however, was to win a contract from the government, which he obtained in 1797. From 1797 to 1807, he produced copper coins for the government. But so strong was the attachment to full-bodied coinage that the 1797 pennies weighed 1 ounce each. Rising copper prices during the Napoleonic wars forced the reduction in weight to ⅔ ounce in 1798 and to ½ ounce in 1805. Royal coinage stopped in 1807, but private coinage continued to be issued. Meanwhile, the royal Mint was rebuilt and fitted with Boulton’s machines in 1810, which were by then capable of striking 70 to 80 coins per minute.
Figure 4.6 A press at the Paris mint, L’Illustration, December 28, 1895. (Photograph courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.)
Figure 4.7 5s. copper coin issued by the Monneron Frères firm, Paris, 1792. The coin was redeemable in assignats in quantities of 50F or more, as stated on the reverse. The scene on the obverse is the oath to the constitution of the French taken during a ceremony on July 14, 1790. (Author’s collection.)
Boulton’s new technology immediately attracted attention abroad. As early as 1791, the firm of Monneron frères in Paris contracted with Boulton to produce private copper coinage in France (see fig. 4.7). The issuers of these coins were soon put out of business when the government monopolized the issue of small denominations and put out its own paper currency. The revolutionary government’s nationalization of private small denomination tokens in France prefigured the British government’s way of adopting the standard formula (see chapter 17). Russia was the first government to buy Boulton’s presses in 1799, followed later by Denmark and Spain (Craig 1953, 264). Steam engines were not, however, easily adapted to the old screw press, and there were technical problems in accommodating the rotation and recoil of the screw. In 1817, Dietrich Uhlhorn, a German engineer in Grevenbroich near Cologne, invented a lever or knuckle-action press which could more easily be driven by steam. His machine could strike 30 to 60 coins per minute, depending on the size of the coin. By 1840, Uhlhorn had built presses for mints in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Utrecht, Vienna, Munich, Karlsruhe, Schwerin, Stockholm, Wiesbaden, and Naples; Uhlhorn machines were also in use in Australia starting in 1853 (Meyer 1840–55, s.v. “Münze”). The method was adapted by Pierre-Antoine Thonnelier in France in 1834. Striking 40 coins per minute, the Thonnelier press came into use in Philadelphia in 1836 and Paris in 1845.29 By the late nineteenth century, when it was used throughout Europe, the Thonnelier press could strike 60 to 120 coins per minute (fig. 4.6).30
Counterfeiting, duplicating, imitating
We now discuss an ever-present aspect of all arrangements for supplying societies with coins: counterfeiting. A counterfeit coin belies either its content or its origin.31 With false content, the counterfeiter cheats the recipient of the coin, who receives less than he thought. With false origin, the counterfeiter cheats the monetary authority of its seigniorage.32 A counterfeiter might be the mint itself (a case we set aside),33 a private party, or a foreign mint.
Sometimes the term “counterfeiting” is reserved for the production of a coin that contained less than its appearance suggested, while “duplicating” means producing a coin substantially identical to the mint’s by someone else. While counterfeiting in the restricted sense was always a problem for monetary authorities, the possibility of duplication also had important consequences for monetary policy. It meant that the mint faced potential competitors, domestic or foreign. The mint’s ability to collect gross seigniorage on any denomination was restrained by the counterfeiter’s production costs (and transportation costs in the case of foreign mints).
The mint could mitigate the problem of duplication by raising its competitors’ production costs above its own, or by depriving them of the coin making technology. Its ability to do so differed for its domestic and foreign competitors.
The production costs of domestic competitors were large because counterfeiting was illegal and severely punished, and because no distinction was made between counterfeiting and duplication (see, for example, Grimaudet 1576, 147). The tradition of Roman law saw the right to mint as a royal prerogative and treated any infringement of this regalian privilege as a form of lese majesty or high treason. The punishment in Roman law and in early German law was the loss of one or both hands, but by the fourteenth century some form of gruesome death was the norm: hanging in England (Ruding 1840, 1:81), burning in Venice (Stahl 2000, 235), boiling in France (Saulcy 1879–92, 1:180).
The force of law could thus be brought to bear on domestic competitors. Punishment required detection, which was uncertain. But even a small probability of dying a gruesome death increased counterfeiters’ labor costs. This argument was made by the Italian Montanari: “those who work at the public mint do not risk their lives, and receive only the price of their labor; but if a worker has to make coin dies in secret, at the risk of his whole being, he will be persuaded to do so only with a lot of gold.” He cited an example of this risk premium, a counterfeiter who paid ten times more for his dies than did the public mint (Montanari [1683] 1804, 104, 115).
Innovations in minting technology afforded the mint some means of restricting access. Mechanization during the Renaissance and the development of the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution initially gave the mint exclusive ownership of the technology. Even after the technology had diffused, the mint could still try to maintain a cost advantage and make the new technology too expensive for competitors. The medieval technology was easy to hide in a goldsmith’s shop, where the tools and equipment were the same as those of the mint. But a screw press was more difficult to conceal and justify, a steam-driven press even more so. The risk of detection might restrict counterfeiters to scales of operation too small to recover high fixed costs.
Foreign competitors were harder to suppress, short of military action. In medieval times, most states were small and no place was far removed from neighboring states. Governments had limited enforcement resources and could not patrol borders. England, being an island, sometimes intercepted foreign imports. The Statute of Money of 1335 prescribed that intensive searches of incoming vessels for counterfeit money be carried out in all ports, and hostelers were ordered to search their guests as well. A few years later, diligent searchers were promised a third of their finds, and lax ones were threatened with fines and imprisonment.34 The evidence reviewed in chapter 8 indicates that these efforts were not successful.
One episode illustrates how foreign competitors were poised to exploit any profitable opportunity. In 1577, France began to mint pure copper pennies using the screw press technology. A few decades later, the technology had spread far enough that a number of small states along France’s borders found it profitable to produce imitations of French pennies. Figure 4.8 shows the French 2d. coin and its imitations in Dombes, Château Renaud, Sedan, and Charleville.35
These foreign coins were not duplicates, since they were clearly distinguishable from the originals. The obverse bore the profile and name of their respective issuers rather than that of the French king, and the reverse, shown in figure 4.8, display recognizable variations on the French royal arms. But the overall design was similar, and they were clearly intended to pass for French pennies. These coins are best described as imitations rather than duplications.
Figure 4.8 Seventeenth–century copper coins from France and nearby areas. Top: double tournois, France, 1642; double tournois, Dombes, 1641. Bottom: double tournois, Sedan, 1633; double tournois, Château Renaud, 1603–05; denier tournois, Charleville, 1653. (Author’s collection.) Photograph: Robert Lifson.
Official attitudes toward duplication softened in eighteenth-century Britain. Imitations of the official copper coinage were produced on a large scale, Manchester being one of the main centers. While counterfeiting the king’s coinage had been made an act of treason by a statute of 1351, imitating the coinage was not held by the courts to be illegal, so long as the coins were sufficiently different from the official ones (see page 270). Parliament could have passed laws against imitations, but did not.
A technology is a collection of ideas about how to do something. This chapter has summarized the history of technologies for making coins: before 1550, the ancient hammer and pile; after 1550, the screw press and the cylinder press; and after 1787, Matthew Boulton’s steam press. At any moment, the leading technology determined the best possible quality of coins as well as the fixed and variable costs for all potential suppliers of coins. The available technology influenced the contest between public monetary authorities and counterfeiters, and placed constraints on what policy makers could attempt.
Against this background, in the next two chapters we shall describe the evolution of another kind of technology, namely the prevailing monetary theory, seen as a more or less coherent set of ideas about what money is and how to supply enough for the needs of trade without causing inflation. We shall document advances in monetary theory that were at least as important as those for making coins from metal that we have studied in this chapter.
1 See Spufford (1988a) for medieval monetary history.
2 We abbreviate the medieval system of units as follows: penny, denier, denaro = 1d.; shilling, sou, soldo = 1s. = 12d.; pound, livre, lira = £1 = 20s. = 240d.
3 France and the Low Countries minted halfpennies (½d), England also minted farthings (¼d).
4 With the exception of the Great Debasement of 1540 to 1550.
5 Curiously, from1461 to 1471 the quattrino was actually the heaviest coin, and the grosso (worth 80d.) was 14% lighter. See Bernocchi (1976, 302–8), Cipolla (1990, 191–209), and chapter 9 for details.
6 See Mayhew (1992, 99–103, 114–21, 140, 148, 152–58, 166–71) for the English mints, Blanchet and Dieudonné (1916) for the French mints. Spufford (1988b) confirms that similar arrangements prevailed in the Low Countries and elsewhere. The cities of Florence and Venice managed their mints directly; but, as elsewhere, the mint merely posted prices and let the private sector choose quantities.
7 This account is based on Blanchet and Dieudonné (1916), Wedel (1960), and Cooper (1988). The technology in Roman times is charmingly illustrated by a Pompei fresco (Paolozzi Strozzi et al. 1992, 44–45).
8 Sprenger (1991, 83) only gives rates for Germany: 2% for Florins, 7% for Schillings and15% for Hellers, in line with our figures for other countries. Plotting the numbers in table 4.2 suggests that costs were inversely related to the square root of the intrinsic content.
9 The mint price for low-grade silver was usually lower, by as much as 10%; but the mint price does not seem to have depended on the coins in which it was paid.
10 Craig (1953, 75), Mayhew (1992, 168).
11 This account is based on Wedel (1960) and Cooper (1988).
12 Some medals were cast and then struck over. This method was imported from Venice to produce groschen in Tirol in 1484 (Wedel 1960, 103).
13 Earlier developments in Italy by Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, and Benvenuto Cellini (who directed the Rome mint from 1529 to 1534) were not pursued.
14 The details are in Vaissière (1892).
15 Hocking (1909), Mazerolle (1907, 26–31).
16 It is usually assumed that the stamping was originally done by a screw press, but there is solid evidence for its use in Paris only after 1600. It is rather unlikely that an Augsburg goldsmith would have had an operating screw press in his workshop, and more plausibly some kind of drop press was involved (Wedel 1960, 130). A 1676 depiction of the Paris Mint machinery shows both a drop press and a screw press. Which mintmaster introduced the screw press is unknown, and no connection with the earlier advances in Italy has ever been found.
17 Cooper (1988, 59), Craig (1953, 164), Wedel (1960, 158).
18 Mazerolle (1907, 26–34), Blanchet and Dieudonné (1916, 192–95).
19 Craig (1953, 118–23), Borden and Brown (1984). Mestrell was terminated in 1578 for counterfeiting.
20 Pepys (1970–83, 4:147).
21 Walther (1939), Majer (1953). The screw press technology is also known to have been transferred to the small kingdom of Navarre (soon to be united to France), where a similar mint was set up by a former engraver of the Paris mint in 1556.
22 See Hahn (1915, 19) and Newald (1885) for the early development of the cylinder press.
23 Walther (1939), Wedel (1960, 134).
24 See Poullain (1709) for the minutes of the trial.
25 Craig (1953, 147–50), Challis (1992b).
26 Cipolla (1990, 233). Only silver coinage was produced in the new mint; gold was produced in the old Zecca. Cipolla does not specify the method used, but Wedel (1960, 134) states that it was a cylinder press.
27 The story of the Segovia Ingenio is told in Del Rivero (1918–19).
28 Because this innovation was introduced in England at the same as mechanization, and therefore the first marked edges appeared on coins produced in a mill, such edges came to be called “milled.”
29 Blanchet and Dieudonné (1916).
30 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., s.v. “mint.” The London mint began to use lever presses in 1872, which produced 90 coins per minute.
31 Luschin von Ebengreuth (1926, 145) distinguishes between “falsch” and “unecht.” Carothers (1930, 128) uses the terms counterfeits and duplicates.
32 He may also be cheating the recipient, if the coin’s value depends on it being authentic.
33 When the mint itself counterfeits, the coin’s origin is what it seems, but its content is not: such are coins produced by corrupt mint officials or a monetary authority secretly debasing its currency. Thus Dante accused King Philip IV of France of being a counterfeiter. See Velde, Weber, and Wright (1999) for a model of debasement based on asymmetric information about the content of coins.
34 Ruding (1840, 1:211, 215). How the inspectors could dispose of their reward is not explained.
35 In the case of Dombes and Château Renaud, the issuers were brother and first cousin of the king, respectively.
