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The Coinages of Renaissance Europe, Ca. 1500

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The Coinages of Renaissance Europe, Ca. 1500 APPENDIX 1: THE COINAGES OF RENAISSANCE EUROPE, CA. 1500 Before the more widespread diffusion of negotiable credit instruments, early-modern European economies utilized primarily commodity mon­ eys in the form of metallic coinages: gold, silver, and copper. Both the gold and silver coinages were alloyed, in varying degrees, with some copper as a base-metal hardening agent. Alloys with proportionately more copper were also used, rather than just smaller size, to distinguish lower from higher denomination coins. 1 Thus most petty coinages were predominantly copper (hence base coinage), some with virtually no silver; but not until 1543 was Europe's first all-copper petty coinage issued, in the Habsburg Netherlands, to mark an important step to­ wards fiat money, i.e. money whose exchange value is established solely by government decree. European governments, however, also played a crucial role in deter­ mining the domestic values of their gold and silver coins, so long as they were able to enforce a monopoly on domestic minting. Through their mint indentures and monetary ordinances, they stipulated the three essential components of all coins struck: the weight or the taille, as the number of coins struck from the legal mint-weight; the fineness or alloy; and the exchange rate or "nominal value", expressed in the domestic money-of-account. That nominal money-of-account value had to be greater than the current market value for the coin's bullion contents (its commodity value), in order to cover the costs of minting, in the form of the mint-master's brassage fee and the government's seigniorage fee. Normally, coins did command such a premium over bullion, because the transaction costs in effecting exchanges were much lower with legal-tender coins, bearing the government's stamp to certify its value, than with raw bullion (especially when trading in bul­ lion was prohibited by law). Most governments also permitted the cir­ culation of certain good-quality foreign gold coins (not silver), though at rates that accorded a smaller premium than those enjoyed by domes­ tic coins. If, for any reason, the public lost confidence in the domestic coinage, that coinage would lose its essential premium and the domes- 672 APPENDIX 1: THE COINAGES OF RENAISSANCE EUROPE, CA. 1500 tic mints would no longer receive any bullion. For then the market val­ ues of both bullion and foreign coins would rise proportionally above the values assigned to domestic coins, as expressed in the domestic money-of-account. Most early-modern moneys-of-account, an accounting system for reckoning and recording coin values, prices, wages, rents, etc., were based on the current domestic silver penny: with 12 pence to the shil­ ling and 20 shillings to the pound (£1 = 20s = 240d). Thus a sum ex­ pressed as 6s 8d was always worth 80 currently circulating pennies. When Carolingian officials established this system, c.800, the "pound" was in fact the pound weight of silver, from which 240 pence were meant to be struck; but subsequent changes in coin weights, alloys, and nominal values forever severed that original relationship. Any increase in the coin's taille (reducing its weight), nominal value, or its copper al­ loy (reducing its fineness) constituted a debasement that proportionally increased the total money-of-account value of coinage struck from the pound, mare, or other mint-weight of fine metal. Conversely, any re­ duction in the taille (increasing the coin's weight), its face value, or its copper alloy (increasing the fineness) constituted a renforeement (strengthening) that proportionally reduced the total money-of-ac­ count value of coinage struck from the pound, mare, etc. of fine metal. Those relationships, which indicate the total money-of-account or "tale" value of the coinage struck from the legal mint-weight of fine gold or silver (pound, mare), can be expressed by this formula: 2 TALE VALUE= TAILLE (NUMBER STRUCK PER POUND) X COIN'S FACE VALUE/PERCENTAGE FINENESS The following tables on the leading west European coins in 1500 pro­ vide their weights and fineness in modern metric terms, and their offi­ cial values in terms of three moneys-of-account: the English pound sterling, the Flemish livre gros (pond groat), and the French livre tournois. They also indicate the relative purchasing power of these coins in 1500, expressed in terms of: (1) major consumer goods in the Antwerp-Mechelen-Brussels region of Brabant; and (2) the summer daily wage of an Antwerp master mason. Self-evident from this table is the fact that an Antwerp mason would then have consumed far more North Sea herring than luxury woolens from Ghent, and that gold coins were usually reserved for just very high-value transactions. .
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