Posted 01/26/2020 2:23 pm
Quote:
... these are the dates of royal decrees (ordonnances in French) authorizing the minting of the coins. But not necessarily the year in which the coin was minted. We might expect that a decree issued in January will result in coins being minted in the same year. But my question (probably to @erafjel) is whether we know if the minting of coins only occurred in that year, or might also have occurred in subsequent years until the end of the reign?
... these are the dates of royal decrees (ordonnances in French) authorizing the minting of the coins. But not necessarily the year in which the coin was minted. We might expect that a decree issued in January will result in coins being minted in the same year. But my question (probably to @erafjel) is whether we know if the minting of coins only occurred in that year, or might also have occurred in subsequent years until the end of the reign?
A very valid question indeed, @tdziemia. I have in fact done some research about this as far as it concerns French coinage, trying to understand the path from royal decision to make a new coin to it actually being made. I'm happy you opened this thread, giving me an excellent opportunity to
share my knowledge 
.Let me begin by giving the conclusion: No, you cannot, in general, deduce that a coin has been minted only during year Y just because the royal decree is dated year Y. It may have been minted several times afterwards (sometimes with small differences that can make it possible to differentiate between emissions, but often not - especially since we talk about hammered coins, where there can be substantial variation in appearance within a single emission).
The steps in introducing a new coin type are like described below for most of the French royal period, beginning sometimes in the 13th century and lasting until the revolution (in fact, the same overall steps continued also after the revolution, but with the king replaced by the government). It seems this procedure was not always followed to the letter, steps could be skipped or merged as far as I understand, but in general this is how it was done:
1. The first step is that the king issues a decree (French ordonnance) about the new coin type(s), describing what they should look like, their weight, fineness, and value. (The decree I gave a link to in the other thread is actually incomplete in this respect, it only states how the new coins should be valued. There is probably another decree - not available online - that states weight and fineness.) This is just a specification, not an order to start manufacturing.
2. The second step is for the office in charge of the royal mintage to issue orders (arrêts) to the mints (of which there were several spread across the country) to manufacture coins according to the decree. These orders would also specify how much silver and/or gold that should be used, that is, effectively how many coins should be minted. The office at the time of Philip IV (whom we discussed in the other thread) was the Generaux-Maîtres des Monnoyes ("General Masters of Moneys"), a group of royal office holders. It was replaced in 1358 by Chambre des Monnoyes ("Chamber of Moneys") which in 1552 changed into Cour des Monnaies ("Court of Moneys").
3. A final step (not always performed) was to issue an announcement (lettre patente) to the public about what the coins looked like and what their value was (remember that French coins generally did not have a value stated on them; the value was assigned by the Crown and could change from time to time, also for already emitted coins - very practical for the king, a bit annoying for the public).
The 2nd step could be repeated a number of times, over the course of several years if no new coin types appeared. Coins were made in batches, each batch requiring a new order/arrêt. There could be years between batches, and since all batches were made to the same specification - the original decree - there is in general no way to tell them apart.
This said, for many coins there is still a good chance that the year of the decree is the only year of mintage. The coin production was very batch-oriented and in many cases the intention was to provide enough coins for a reasonably long period of time with the first batch. Not until there was a shortage of coins was a new batch ordered (this one can sometimes see already in the decrees, where the king motivates the issue of new coins with "the great need and lack of coins in our kingdom").
