12 ms·

Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures

58 points by zeristor 3y ago

gunshai 3y ago
If you look closely in the first image you can tell that some of those coins are "clipped" then the coin with ridges is not clipped. The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy. Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  > Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. The first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations also covers some of this. Specifically I remember the clipping topic, and then landlords weighing payments to protect themselves from clipping.
  - cjs_ac 3y ago
    Weighing coins was always the preferred way of counting money. The pound sterling is called the pound sterling because 240 mediaeval pennies minted from sterling silver weighed one pound.
    - Ichthypresbyter 3y ago
      And some modern coins are designed so that bags of mixed coins can be counted by weight. For instance, all US cupronickel clad coins (dime, quarter, Kennedy half-dollar and Eisenhower dollar) have the same ratio of weight to value, such that a pound of any combination of them is worth $20.
      - jeffbee 3y ago
        This is sort of interesting as historical trivia, but at what point would it become convenient or useful? You'd need to sort your coins before weighing them, and it seems like if you were partly sorting your coins you may as well totally sort them.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        ducttapecrown 3y ago
        Since the coins have the same ratio of value to weight, you don't need to sort them before weighing them. Still pointless though!
        jeffbee 3y ago
        You would, because you have to get rid of all the pennies, nickels, and oddball dollar coins.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        justsomehnguy 3y ago
        > such that a pound of any combination of them is worth $20 Also most of the time you can just dump a bag of coins on the table and visually quickly determine an odd ones, remove them, weight the remainder. Sorting != counting.
      - Arrath 3y ago
        I had no idea. That's actually really neat!
  - gunshai 3y ago
    An interesting side effect of clipping was essentially the discovery of Gresham's Law. The Bad Money drives out good money. While essentially understood/internalized by the merchant class plebiscite(heh) for thousands of years, wasn't formalized until the mid 1800s. For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin). Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice? Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really. We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.
- xandrius 3y ago
  Got a way for us to find that course?
  - Luc 3y ago
    Professor Barth probably: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLinliDgP9EbScxfH5wxoX8I_HNRSElqZ_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLinliDgP9EbScxfH5wxoX...
    - gunshai 3y ago
      Ya it's this guy apologies for not posting the link.
  - dumpHero2 3y ago
    Gemini has been pretty helpful with search lately: https://g.co/gemini/share/2d4a0a1f497f https://g.co/gemini/share/2d4a0a1f497f
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Not all clipping was illegal, or even nefarious. It was only a crime where there was a solid national currency system, which was far from universal. Many people would be trading in a variety of currencies, none of which was specifically backed by any laws forbidding clipping. Clipping would become so common that anyone with good coins was a fool not to clip them down to the local norm. There was also a general lack of small change in the ancient world. Heavily clipped coins, or even their clippings, likely substituted for the lack of smaller denominations. If a coin is worth its weight in silver, silver must be worth its weight in coins, clippings or not.
  - gunshai 3y ago
    Ya there isn't much here to dispute. However one side effect of this type of valuation was essentially the trust in measurement systems. This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place. It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor. All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.
skybrian 3y ago
The Roman empire was built on plunder and after converting to Christianity, the old pagan temples got plundered too. Precious metals get recycled. Interesting that they were able to trace how it happened.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Which empires were not built on plunder?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    The US, for one.
    - MeImCounting 3y ago
      Well, about that.... The US was certainly built on plunder, perhaps not of the shiny metals kind but plunder nonetheless.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        > The US was certainly built on plunder Selling iron ore and other raw material to other countries? I don't think so. Don't neglect all the goods and services created by an industrial economy. You can't dig a house out of the ground, nor shoes, nor canned goods, nor glass bottles, nor choo choo trains, nor airplanes, nor textiles, etc. Japan and Hong Kong both proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that great wealth does not come from plunder, it comes from creating things.
        MeImCounting 3y ago
        I think maybe youre missing your own point here? The US got rich from primarily three sources: First it was agriculture specifically tobacco and sugar both of which are cultivars I believe qualify as plunder. Next it was oil, which came from from land taken as plunder. This oil was primarily consumed domestically and contributed to the building up of the large industrial manufacturing economy then and later in the 20th century. Then finally yes the US had a large manufacturing economy which lead to the innovation and information economies of the late 20th and 21st centuries. It is clear to me that much of the United States' wealth comes from the plunder of the conquered peoples of the continental US, Caribbean islands and Pacific islands. https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/ushistory/chapter/the-economics-of-cotton/ https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/ushistory/chapter/the-... https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1681/tobacco--colonial-american-economy/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1681/tobacco--colonial-... https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Industrialization-of-the-U-S-economy https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Industrializa...
blacksmith_tb 3y ago
It reminds me a little of how Europe (Spain, particularly) extracted enormous amounts of silver from South America and shipped it to China to trade for goods[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_16th_to_19th_centuries#Into_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_1...
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  China was not interested in European goods and only wanted to get paid in 'hard currency' for its own goods and commodities (China, silk, tea, etc). The Spanish went with it but the English did not want to and decided to find something the Chinese would want. And they found opium, which they could conveniently produce in their Asia colonies. They also started producing tea in their own colonies to avoid having to buy it from China (this is the reason why India produces tea and Indians drink chai).
  - Kbelicius 3y ago
    > this is the reason why India produces tea and Indians drink chai Chai is just tea or is it not in India?
    - gibolt 3y ago
      Cha is tea in Chinese. I assume this is Indian naming is mentioned as a carryover from Chinese.
      - porphyra 3y ago
        Northern Chinese (Mandarin, etc) call it Cha which became chai etc. Southern Chinese (Min Nan, etc) call it Teh which became tea etc. You can see that coastal nations got their tea from the seafaring southern regions whereas much of Central Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe got it from the northerners via the Silk Road. https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/g4bmh3/chai_tea/ https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/g4bmh3/chai_...
    - 3y ago
gwbas1c 3y ago
> “There wasn’t a Bank of England at this stage – if you want some coins, you make some coins. You just need to be someone who’s got the wealth to do it.” Seems like something the cryptocurrency advocates could learn from.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  Coins were just pre-weighted pieces of silver though
- mr_toad 3y ago
  It’s not even true - official coins were minted in Britain since Roman times.
zeristor 3y ago
Cambridge University have a little YouTube video which goes into more depth: The Silver Standard: Solving a medieval money mystery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joOPPTdF06Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joOPPTdF06Y
salemh 3y ago
[dead]
jl6 3y ago
I wonder how widely the isotopic signature method could be applied. Precious metals don't tend to ever get thrown away. Could we trace the flow of all gold and silver throughout history? Could we tell the difference between "clean" gold and gold that has been melted down from nazi loot or the Jules Rimet trophy?
- porkbeer 3y ago
  Apparently we can date any hot formed metal to pre/post nuclear age thanks to background radiation not present in unmined, or underwater metals. Determining origin of metals once melted is haed unless it has a unique formation, or unique impurities. But you would need to know them before hand.

58 points by zeristor 3y ago

If you look closely in the first image you can tell that some of those coins are "clipped" then the coin with ridges is not clipped. The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy. Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.

gwbas1c 3y ago
> Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. The first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations also covers some of this. Specifically I remember the clipping topic, and then landlords weighing payments to protect themselves from clipping.
- cjs_ac 3y ago
  Weighing coins was always the preferred way of counting money. The pound sterling is called the pound sterling because 240 mediaeval pennies minted from sterling silver weighed one pound.
  - Ichthypresbyter 3y ago
    And some modern coins are designed so that bags of mixed coins can be counted by weight. For instance, all US cupronickel clad coins (dime, quarter, Kennedy half-dollar and Eisenhower dollar) have the same ratio of weight to value, such that a pound of any combination of them is worth $20.
    - jeffbee 3y ago
      This is sort of interesting as historical trivia, but at what point would it become convenient or useful? You'd need to sort your coins before weighing them, and it seems like if you were partly sorting your coins you may as well totally sort them.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - ducttapecrown 3y ago
        Since the coins have the same ratio of value to weight, you don't need to sort them before weighing them. Still pointless though!
        jeffbee 3y ago
        You would, because you have to get rid of all the pennies, nickels, and oddball dollar coins.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - justsomehnguy 3y ago
        > such that a pound of any combination of them is worth $20 Also most of the time you can just dump a bag of coins on the table and visually quickly determine an odd ones, remove them, weight the remainder. Sorting != counting.
    - Arrath 3y ago
      I had no idea. That's actually really neat!
- gunshai 3y ago
  An interesting side effect of clipping was essentially the discovery of Gresham's Law. The Bad Money drives out good money. While essentially understood/internalized by the merchant class plebiscite(heh) for thousands of years, wasn't formalized until the mid 1800s. For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin). Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice? Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really. We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.
xandrius 3y ago
Got a way for us to find that course?
- Luc 3y ago
  Professor Barth probably: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLinliDgP9EbScxfH5wxoX8I_HNRSElqZ_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLinliDgP9EbScxfH5wxoX...
  - gunshai 3y ago
    Ya it's this guy apologies for not posting the link.
- dumpHero2 3y ago
  Gemini has been pretty helpful with search lately: https://g.co/gemini/share/2d4a0a1f497f https://g.co/gemini/share/2d4a0a1f497f
sandworm101 3y ago
Not all clipping was illegal, or even nefarious. It was only a crime where there was a solid national currency system, which was far from universal. Many people would be trading in a variety of currencies, none of which was specifically backed by any laws forbidding clipping. Clipping would become so common that anyone with good coins was a fool not to clip them down to the local norm. There was also a general lack of small change in the ancient world. Heavily clipped coins, or even their clippings, likely substituted for the lack of smaller denominations. If a coin is worth its weight in silver, silver must be worth its weight in coins, clippings or not.
- gunshai 3y ago
  Ya there isn't much here to dispute. However one side effect of this type of valuation was essentially the trust in measurement systems. This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place. It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor. All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.

skybrian 3y ago

The Roman empire was built on plunder and after converting to Christianity, the old pagan temples got plundered too. Precious metals get recycled. Interesting that they were able to trace how it happened.

readthenotes1 3y ago
Which empires were not built on plunder?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- WalterBright 3y ago
  The US, for one.
  - MeImCounting 3y ago
    Well, about that.... The US was certainly built on plunder, perhaps not of the shiny metals kind but plunder nonetheless.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      > The US was certainly built on plunder Selling iron ore and other raw material to other countries? I don't think so. Don't neglect all the goods and services created by an industrial economy. You can't dig a house out of the ground, nor shoes, nor canned goods, nor glass bottles, nor choo choo trains, nor airplanes, nor textiles, etc. Japan and Hong Kong both proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that great wealth does not come from plunder, it comes from creating things.
      - MeImCounting 3y ago
        I think maybe youre missing your own point here? The US got rich from primarily three sources: First it was agriculture specifically tobacco and sugar both of which are cultivars I believe qualify as plunder. Next it was oil, which came from from land taken as plunder. This oil was primarily consumed domestically and contributed to the building up of the large industrial manufacturing economy then and later in the 20th century. Then finally yes the US had a large manufacturing economy which lead to the innovation and information economies of the late 20th and 21st centuries. It is clear to me that much of the United States' wealth comes from the plunder of the conquered peoples of the continental US, Caribbean islands and Pacific islands. https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/ushistory/chapter/the-economics-of-cotton/ https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/ushistory/chapter/the-... https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1681/tobacco--colonial-american-economy/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1681/tobacco--colonial-... https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Industrialization-of-the-U-S-economy https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Industrializa...

blacksmith_tb 3y ago

It reminds me a little of how Europe (Spain, particularly) extracted enormous amounts of silver from South America and shipped it to China to trade for goods[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_16th_to_19th_centuries#Into_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_1...

mytailorisrich 3y ago
China was not interested in European goods and only wanted to get paid in 'hard currency' for its own goods and commodities (China, silk, tea, etc). The Spanish went with it but the English did not want to and decided to find something the Chinese would want. And they found opium, which they could conveniently produce in their Asia colonies. They also started producing tea in their own colonies to avoid having to buy it from China (this is the reason why India produces tea and Indians drink chai).
- Kbelicius 3y ago
  > this is the reason why India produces tea and Indians drink chai Chai is just tea or is it not in India?
  - gibolt 3y ago
    Cha is tea in Chinese. I assume this is Indian naming is mentioned as a carryover from Chinese.
    - porphyra 3y ago
      Northern Chinese (Mandarin, etc) call it Cha which became chai etc. Southern Chinese (Min Nan, etc) call it Teh which became tea etc. You can see that coastal nations got their tea from the seafaring southern regions whereas much of Central Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe got it from the northerners via the Silk Road. https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/g4bmh3/chai_tea/ https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/g4bmh3/chai_...
  - 3y ago

gwbas1c 3y ago

> “There wasn’t a Bank of England at this stage – if you want some coins, you make some coins. You just need to be someone who’s got the wealth to do it.” Seems like something the cryptocurrency advocates could learn from.

Wytwwww 3y ago
Coins were just pre-weighted pieces of silver though
mr_toad 3y ago
It’s not even true - official coins were minted in Britain since Roman times.

zeristor 3y ago

Cambridge University have a little YouTube video which goes into more depth: The Silver Standard: Solving a medieval money mystery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joOPPTdF06Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joOPPTdF06Y

salemh 3y ago

[dead]

jl6 3y ago

I wonder how widely the isotopic signature method could be applied. Precious metals don't tend to ever get thrown away. Could we trace the flow of all gold and silver throughout history? Could we tell the difference between "clean" gold and gold that has been melted down from nazi loot or the Jules Rimet trophy?

porkbeer 3y ago
Apparently we can date any hot formed metal to pre/post nuclear age thanks to background radiation not present in unmined, or underwater metals. Determining origin of metals once melted is haed unless it has a unique formation, or unique impurities. But you would need to know them before hand.