Walking Back In Time From 1600 To Antiquity By Decades (V3.0)

I see. The Wiener pfennigs do make for an interesting quirk amongst the medieval European coinage.

On the other spectrum, here is another cash coin from the Southern Song dynasty. A 2 cash Jiading Tongbao from 1208. The "Yuán" inscription on the reverse, meaning "the first", represent the 1st year of the Jiading era (1208) under Emperor Ningzong.

Lots of interesting coins this decade. Do cash coins often have a reverse inscription?

I don't think English coins were consistent at this time. In the 1100s they were generally terrible. Coin quality had a lot to do with who was fighting who, what resources they had and how quickly they needed the money.

I will limp into (and out of) this decade with another from John. It's unusual for a cut farthing in that you can (just about) work out the mint and moneyer, who happens to be the same one who made my other John.

John Class 5b2 Short Cross Cut Farthing, 1205-1207

London. Silver, 9mm, 0.3g. Facing bust with sceptre; (H)ENRI(CUS REX). Short voided cross, quatrefoils; +ILGE(R.ON.LVNDE) (moneyer Ilger of London) (S 1351).

@john, yikes a quarter-farthing—now that is small change. Any thoughts on its buying power at the start of the 13th Century?

I do recall seeing a cut piece of a farthing posted on CCF a year or two ago, but I don't think I'd be able to find the thread.

It's weird how so many European countries in this period (and within several centuries on each side of it for that matter) would rather issue teensy tiny silver coins, and cut them if needed, than bother with copper/bronze denominations. Was there a prejudice against copper coins? If so, why?

Actually this problem existed throughout history until the metal value of a coin was decoupled from its face value. In Britain, this happened in George III's reign when they adopted the gold standard (and didn't link the value of silver to it).

There were many problems to overcome with both silver and copper. The Romans, Tudors and Georgians all struggled. Depending on the value of the metal, silver coins might have to be impossibly small for small change (think of Henry VIII farthings), while bronze had to be impossibly big (think of George III cartwheels). The copper was too difficult and costly to make at the right size, and if you made the coins smaller (as with James I farthings) you caused inflation and huge numbers of counterfeits (as in George III's early reign). Obviously, making silver too big was just encouraging people to hoard or melt it down.

Then if the relative value of gold, silver and copper changed, you'd get hoarding, counterfeiting, melting down etc of each one depending which was worth what.

So finally, gold was made the only 'standard' and everything was convertible into gold at face value, so you could make coins cheaply and it no longer mattered what the metal value was. The reason they didn't do that earlier was because the technology for preventing counterfeits hadn't caught up until developments with the Charles I farthings and the machinery at Boulton's Birmingham mint. Plus no-one trusted coins that weren't worth their value in metal until a banking system had been developed that allowed people to trust in a 'theoretical' account value, which by then had come about via the Dutch and British East India Companies and the use of banknotes. Even then, it took until the 1900s to finally stop adding silver to the alloy.

Yes, why? There were certainly precedents, for instance India, China and Rome all had a rich and long lasting copper/bronze coinage. Closer and more contemporary there was Byzantium. So technically and socially definitely possible.

So why did Western Europe quit using copper/bronze coins soon after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and didn't pick it up again until the 15th century? It is a good question. I am leaning towards @january1may's thought about prejudice as the main reason, a prejudice that took centuries to fully overcome. There is an element of (a certain amount of) impracticality too, but not enough to by itself justify the lack of copper coins, I think.

So, if you have the stamina to read through my thoughts on the subject, here goes.

Let's look at the situation in France, Italy (i.e., Italian city states) and England. With a common origin in the Carolingian livre-sous-denier/lira-soldo-denaro/pound-shilling-penny system, the common denier, denaro and penny coins were valued about the same up until the 13th-14th century or so. And a penny or denier was not small change at that time, as demonstrated by them being cut into four farthings and by the presence of ½ deniers (obols) and 1/4 denari (quartaroli). That these small coins had a significant value was perhaps one reason to stick to the idea that they should have an intrinsic value. From the original 1.7 g of (almost) pure silver specified by Charlemagne (well, he expressed it as 1/240th of a Carolingian pound), by around 1200 it was down to 0.7-1.4 g of more or less good silver.

Assuming that intrinsic value would be realized in copper, how much would a "King John copper penny" weigh? The price ratio between silver and copper has been amazingly steady around 100 for at least the last 1000 years or so - with spurious ups and downs of course as supply, mostly of silver, has varied (spot price ratio at time of writing is 85, in 14th century Byzantium it was about 110). So roughly 100 times heavier, which for the 1.4 g King John silver penny (with perhaps 90 % fineness?) that @JohnConduitt showed a decade back would yield a sturdy piece of about 125 g (4.4 oz)! The farthing would come out at a more acceptable 31 g (just a bit more than a Roman sestertius, a common and apparently acceptably sized coin).

So from a practical point of view, it just might work for the smallest denominations, if we hold on to the idea of the necessity of intrinsic value. But in the minds of people around 1200, maybe copper was regarded as a metal for utilities like tools and church bells, not as bullion, and therefor simply not suited for coins? Prejudice, in other words!

Moving forward in time, we can make the observation that while the English pound retains a relatively stable value over the centuries, the French livre and Italian lira undergo a steady debasement and decline in value. Towards the end of the 15th century, an English sovereign (1 £) was worth 8-9 French livres or 20-25 Italian lire. A severe lack of silver in the 1400s led to deniers and denari containing only diminutive amounts of silver mixed with copper, and in the early 1470s the first pure copper coins appeared in Naples and Venice. The Neapolitan copper cavallo weighed 2 g and had about the same value as a denaro, which was fairly close to its intrinsic copper value at the time. For the devalued lira, using copper and keeping the intrinsic value worked in the 1470s, for small change. So prejudice overcome to some extent, but we still want the coins to be worth their value!

France followed a 100 years later, in 1577 with the first denier tournois in pure copper, with a weight of 1.7 g. An accurate weight for 1 denier's worth of copper would have been about 4.5 g. Thus the principle of maintained intrinsic value had by the 1570s been abandoned by the state and by the people (again, for small change, anything worth more than 2 deniers would still contain a bit of silver for nearly 100 more years). No more prejudice against copper!

In England (and here John and others know better than me, so any corrections are welcome), farthing and ½ penny copper tokens with weight far less than prescribed by any intrinsic value appeared in the early 1600s. The Royal Mint wouldn't have any of those continental inventions, but in 1672 they began minting copper farthings and ½ pennies, weighing about 5.5 g respectively 11 g, which was a little less than a completely intrinsic value weight. That seems to have been the principle of The Royal Mint until 1797, when the "cartwheel" penny and two pence coins were minted, with their impressive 28.3 g respectively 56.7 g (1 oz resp. 2 oz) weights, representing the true intrinsic value of the copper. The drawback of a strong pound ...! That may have been the last occurence of copper coins with a true intrinsic value. Meanwhile, through all of the 18th century, low weight copper tokens abounded. So here we have a different situation than in France; while the state stuck to the intrinsic value principle, the people were happy using tokens. But maybe we shouldn't call The Royal Mint prejudiced, but rather principled?

A long text, I hope you found it rewarding in some sense, if you have made it all the way here! (And I haven't even mentioned Swedish 17th century plate money, the largest of which were copper plates weighing 19 kg, or 42 lbs!)

Now I will shut up until I have a coin to show (I think).

A really great discussion here in the middle of this thread! Nice work and thx for contributing to our knowledge! While I can't improve on what has been said, I've got a little more to post for this decade.

This Pfennig was issued by the Austrian Duchy of Carinthia. It was minted at St. Veit between 1202 and 1256 AD under the authority of Bernhard II. I have attributed it as Luschin 189 and CNA CB11.





Here is another Carinthian Pfennig issued by Bernhard II. It was minted at St. Veit between 1202 and 1256 AD. The obv legend is DVX CARINTHIE while the rev legend is SANT VEIT (retrograde). I have attributed it as Luschin 199 and CNA CB12a.

Here is my so-called Octopus Man, a Massa from Ceylon. It was issued under the authority of Dharmasoka Deva and was minted between 1208 and 1209 AD. It is attributed as Mitchiner 842-844.