This major study traces the development of English minting from the seventh-century to the twentieth-century.

Private Enterprise and the Foundation of Modern Coinage

The United Kingdom was the last major nation-state in the world to adopt decimal currency, 50 years ago in 1971. Why was it so slow to do so? What changed politicians' and peoples' minds about it in the 1960s? Were Britain's plans to join the EEC influential? What was the impact of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand going decimal several years earlier? Or did it simply happen because of common sense, with a decimal system so much easier to learn and use than pounds, shillings and pence?The route to find the right designs was a complex one, with interfering politicians, struggling artists, and at one stage an angry Duke of Edinburgh! It took over five years to get there, and then there was the seven-sided 50 pence - a design classic we would say today, but what did the media and public think of it when it was launched in 1969?When Britain Went Decimal takes readers through the changeover leading to D-Day (decimalisation day), and beyond: how smooth and successful was the process? Did newspapers secretly hope it would fail? While decimalisation might have seemed right at the time, did it lead to inflation, as many people believe today?Entertainingly written and beautifully illustrated, this first book on decimalisation since 1973 attempts to answer all these questions and more, looking as much at the design - indeed the 'art' behind the new coinage - as at social, economic and political history.

Already famous throughout Europe for his theories of planetary motion and gravity, Isaac Newton decided to take on the job of running the Royal Mint. And there, Newton became drawn into a battle with William Chaloner, the most skilful of counterfeiters, a man who not only got away with faking His Majesty's coins (a crime that the law equated with treason), but was trying to take over the Mint itself. But Chaloner had no idea who he was taking on. Newton pursued his enemy with the cold, implacable logic that he brought to his scientific research. Set against the backdrop of early eighteenth-century London with its sewers running down the middle of the streets, its fetid rivers, its packed houses, smoke and fog, its industries and its great port, this dark tale of obsession and revenge transforms our image of Britain's greatest scientist.

In this 1953 book the story of the London Mint is told by the former Deputy Master and Comptroller of the Royal Mint.

This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in fundamental ways, the momentous period in our literary history, for they are the long moment in which the category of literature itself emerged as English writing began to insist, for the first time, that it floated free of any social reality or function. This book also charts the complex mechanisms by which English writing acquired this power in a series of linked close readings of both canonical and more obscure texts. It encloses those readings in five compelling accounts of much broader cultural areas, describing, in particular, the productive relationship of Middle English writing to medieval technology, insurgency, statecraft and cultural place, concluding with an in depth account of the particular arguments, emphases and techniques English writers used to claim a wholly new jurisdiction for their work. Both this history and its readings are everywhere informed by the most exciting developments in recent Middle English scholarship as well as literary and cultural theory. It serves as an introduction to all these areas as well as a contribution, in its own right, to each of them.

The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the providential) compatible with market exchange, new instruments of credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and capital markets. Europeans, including the settler societies in North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the project of creating currencies that supported their political power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation. The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.

This series provides a forum for the most recent research into the political, social and ecclesiastical history of the 14th century.

Money could be as essential to everyday life in medieval England as it is today, but who made the coinage, how was it used and why is it important? This definitive study charts the development of coin production from the small workshops of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England to the centralised factory mints of the late Middle Ages, the largest being in the Tower of London. Martin Allen investigates the working lives of the people employed in the mints in unprecedented detail and places the mints in the context of medieval England's commerce and government, showing the king's vital interest in the production of coinage, the maintenance of its quality and his mint revenue. This unique source of reference also offers the first full history of the official exchanges in the City of London regulating foreign exchange and an in-depth analysis of the changing size and composition of medieval England's coinage.

Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange - a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself - along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money's design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money's creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. 'Commodity money' was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half of the book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the first time with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown of commodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard - all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentives and public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money's neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money.