proportion to the value in foreign parts. Of this the goldsmiths made, naturally, the advantages usual in such cases, by picking out or culling the heaviest, and melting them down, and exporting them. It happened, also, that our gold coins were too weighty, and of these also they took the like advantage. Moreover, such merchants' servants as still kept their masters' running cash, had fallen into a way of clandestinely lending the same to the goldsmiths, at four-pence per cent. per diem (about six per cent. per annum); who, by these and such like means, were enabled to lend out great quantities of cash to necessitous merchants and others, weekly or monthly, at high interest; and also began to discount the merchants' bills at the like, or an higher rate of interest. Much about the same time they began to receive the rents of gentlemen's estates remitted to town, and to allow them and others who put cash into their hands some interest for it, if it remained but for a single month in their hands, or even a lesser time. This was a great allurement for people to put this money into their hands, which would bear interest till the day they wanted it. And they could also draw it out by one hundred pounds, or fifty pounds, &c., at time, as they wanted it, with infinitely less trouble than if they had lent it out on either real or personal security. The consequence was, that it quickly brought a great quantity of cash into their hands; so that the chief or greatest of them were now enabled to supply Cromwell with money in advance on the revenues, as his occasions required, upon great advantages to themselves." Here we have all the principal operations of our modern banks, including even some portion of the accommodation given by the Bank of England to the government in our day, described as already in use in the middle of the seventeenth century. No banking establishment, properly so called, however, like those already existing at Amsterdam and in several of the Italian States, was begun in England during the present period, although various projects of the kind were submitted both to the public and the parliament.

In 1652 the postage of letters in England was farmed or let by the state to John Manley, Esq., for 10,000l. a-year; and four years after the whole establishment of the Post Office was subjected to a revision and placed upon a more stable foundation than heretofore. In 1652 the number of hackney-coaches licensed to ply in the streets of London was raised to two hundred, and in 1654 to three hundred, the government and regulation of them being placed in the court of aldermen. The old dread of the over-increase of the capital, however, still continued to haunt the legislature of the commonwealth as much as it had formerly done the court. An edict published in 1656 declares that "the great and excessive number of houses, edifices, outhouses, and cottages erected and new-built in and about the city of London is found to be very mischievous and inconvenient, and a great annoyance and nuisance to the com

monwealth."

Whereupon a fine of one year's

rent is imposed on all houses erected on new foundations within ten miles of the walls of London since 1620, not having four acres of freehold land attached to them; and a fine of 1007. on all such as should be erected in future. But from the operation of the act were excepted the buildings belonging to the several city hospitals; the Earl of Clare's new market (now Clare Market), which is described as just then built; the streets about Lincoln's Inn Fields, then in course of being erected; Bangor Court in Shoe Lane, then about to be built upon the site of the Bishop of Bangor's house and garden; and some other recent erections below London Bridge and on the other side of the river. These were no doubt all the chief additions that had been made to the metropolis within the last few years.

Throughout the whole of the present period both the fineness and the weight of the silver coinage continued the same as they had been fixed in the year 1601; that is to say, the pound of Mint silver contained eighteen ounces of alloy, and was coined into sixty-two shillings.*

Immediately after his accession, James I. directed two coinages of gold,-one of pieces of ten shillings, five shillings, and two and sixpence in value, that is, of angels, half angels, and quarter angels, from gold of 23 carats 3 grains fine; the other of pieces of twenty shillings and the same inferior current values, that is, of sovereigns, halfsovereigns, crowns, and half-crowns, from gold of only 22 carats fine. This throwing into circulation of two gold coinages of different standards must, one would think, have been attended with some inconveniences. At the same time he ordered a silver coinage of crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpences, two-pences, pence, and half-pence. All the pieces of these first coinages are distinguished from those afterwards issued by bearing the words ANG. Sco. (for England and Scotland), instead of those denoting King of Great Britain, which was the title James assumed the following year, and which he directed, by proclamation, to be thenceforth used upon all the coins. In the next coinage, the pound of gold, which had heretofore passed only for thirty-three pounds ten shillings, was ordered to be raised in value to thirtyseven pounds, four shillings, and sixpence, the proclamation to that effect setting forth that the English gold coin had of late been exported in great quantities in consequence of its not bearing a due proportion to the silver, as in other nations. The gold coins were now directed to be, one of the value of twenty shillings, to be called the unity; one of ten shillings, to be called the double crown; one of five shillings, to be called the Britain crown; one of four shillings, to be called the thistle crown; and one of two shillings and sixpence, to be called the half-crown. The next year the value of the pound of gold was raised to forty pounds ten shillings; and at that rate a gold coinage was ordered

See vol. ii. p. 798.

shillings, and five shillings, which, in consequence of being impressed with the king's head surrounded by a laurel, came to be commonly known by the name of laurels. Both the twenty-shilling laurel and the unity were also popularly called broad-pieces. In this reign likewise appeared the first English copper coinage, consisting of farthings, which were issued in 1613, the private tokens of lead and brass, which shop-keepers and other dealers had long been in the habit of fabricating and using in their payments, being at the same time abolished. It was calculated that there were about three thousand retailers of victuals and small wares in and about London that thus used their own tokens; and the practice was general in all the considerable towns throughout the kingdom.

In the second year of the reign of Charles I., a pound of gold of 23 carats 3 grains fine was directed to be accounted of the value of forty-four pounds ten shillings; and a pound of 22 carats fine of the value of forty-one pounds. "In the former reign," observes Leake," the great quantity of silver brought into Europe upon the opening of the mines of Peru and Mexico had raised the price of gold, and caused it to be exported, so that for two years hardly any usual payments were made in gold; but the gold, by reason of this advanced price, being brought back, there followed as great a scarcity of silver." It had been the practice, too, of the goldsmiths for some years, he adds, to cull out the weightiest and best silver money, for which they would give a premium of two and sometimes three shillings on the hundred pounds, and to melt and export it. Above ten millions of pounds sterling in silver were coined from 1630 to 1643; (6 nevertheless, in 1632," Rushworth tells us, "there was such plenty of gold in the kingdom, and such scarcity of silver, that the drovers and farmers, who brought their cattle, sheep, and swine to be sold in Smithfield, would ordinarily make their bargain to be paid in silver and not in gold. And, besides, in this time people did ordinarily give two-pence, and sometimes more, to get twenty shillings in silver for the exchange of a twenty-shilling piece of gold, full weight. And in and about London and Westminster, as well as in other parts, most people carried gold scales in their pockets to weigh gold on all occasions." The coins struck by Charles in the early part of his reign were of the same denominations as those issued by his father. Among his schemes for raising money at this time were various projects which were set on foot for coining silver extracted from the lead-mines in different parts of England. Of these, however, the only one that turned out in any considerable degree productive was that for coining the silver yielded by the Welsh mines, for which purpose a mint was established, in 1637, at the castle of Aberystwith, in Cardiganshire. These mines ultiHistorical Account of English Money, p. 200. † Collections, ii. 150.

mately yielded about a hundred pounds of silver aweek; and the mint at Aberystwith proved of considerable service to the king during his war with the parliament. Of several other mines, the ore of which was tried by workmen brought out of Germany, those of Slaithborne in Lancashire are said to have yielded four per cent. of silver; those of Barnstable in Devonshire and Court-Martin in Cornwall, ten per cent. ; and those at Miggleswicke and Wardel, in the county of Durham, six or eight per cent. In this reign, also, was introduced, by Nicholas Briot, a native of France, the process of fabricating coins by machinery, instead of by the hammer, the only method hitherto employed. Briot, driven from France, where he had been gra‐ ver general of the coin, by the intrigues of persons whose interests were opposed to his ingenious improvements, appears to have come over to England about the year 1628, and in 1633 was constituted chief engraver of coins for the mint in the Tower of London. He remained in this country till he was recalled to France by the Chancellor Seguier about the year 1640. While he presided over the cutting of the dies for the English coinage, it was considered to be the most beautiful then known. Among other pieces of his striking is one in gold, of the weight of 8 pennyweights, 18 grains, "with the king's head," says Leake, "admirably well done, bare-headed, and the lovelock, as it was called, hanging before, which, it seems, was so disagreeable to the Roundheads (so called from the contrary extreme) that Prynne wrote a book against it, called The Unloveliness of Lovelocks." being dated in 1630, must have been among the earliest of Briot's productions. After the war had begun and the parliament had seized the Tower, Charles set up mints at Shrewsbury, Oxford, York, and other places, most of the money coined at which has the mint mark of the Prince of Wales's feathers, as having been struck by the workmen and instruments belonging to the establishment at Aberystwith. The greater part of it appears also to have been made, in the old-fashioned way, by the hammer, the use of the mill having been probably laid aside on Briot's departure. "The unhappy situation of the king's affairs," says Leake," may be traced by his money, which grew worse and worse in the stamp, till at last they hardly deserve the name of a coin, seeming rather the work of a smith (as perhaps they were) than a graver, and manifest they were coined in the greatest hurry and confusion." Besides money of the common species, various other coins or tokens, which have received the name of obsidional or siege pieces, were issued on different occasions by the royalists in the course of the war. Among these were the pieces stamped at Newark in 1643 and 1646, which are in the form of a lozenge; those stamped at the siege of Carlisle in 1645, which are octangular; the Pontefract pieces, some of which are round, some octangular, some lozenge-shaped; and another sort of money, consisting merely of bits of silver-plate about an inch and a half long, with a rude re

This,