Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

Being this day in Yorkshire I hear that a mint has come to York to coin silver tankards, plates, cups, etc. The poor people has been up in great numbers in Ratsdale [Rochdale] by reason that their clipped money would not go, and was marching in great fury to one of their parliament men’s houses, which they swore to pull down to the ground and ransack. But the gentlemen round about, getting immediate notice of it, soon pacified all by commanding that their clipped sixpences should go if not clipped within the innermost rim, and by promising that they would take care to change their little old money for great money, and suchlike, or else they would have done a great deal of mischief.

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Comment

Three days later, writing from Broughton, just south of the Humber:

Most people seems mightily dissatisfied, though they love King William very well. Yet they curse this parliament, not for their design of coining all new, but for their ill management of it in setting so little time, in taking no care to coin fast and send new money out, etc.

In most places the people has got such a way of taking money now as was never in use before: I mean not in England; and that is they take all by weight. Every one carry a pair of scales in his pocket, and if he take but a shilling in the market, he pulls out his scales, and weighs it before that he will have it, and if it want but two or three grains they refuse it.

And for all that the act of parliament says sixpennies shall go not clipped within the innermost rim, yet nevertheless no body will take sixpences unless they were never clipped and be full weight.

Poor people are forced to let their clipped shillings go for 6d., 8d., and some at 10d. a piece, and some at shops are forced to give as much more for anything they buy as is asked for it, etc. These are very hard things, and but that the nation is so mightily in love with the king they would all be soon up in arms.

The parliament promised that no man should lose anything by this thing, and laid a tax for seven years for the making up the deficiency of the clipped silver, yet everybody must pay the tax and lose vastly in their little money to boot.

I have seen unclipped half crowns that has weighed down fifteen shillings clipped. Some have weighed more. Shillings I have seen that has outweighed three, four, five, six shillings clipped.

And that which surprised me today, one said unto me “Sir, I have been weighing a shilling and it wanted seven groats of weight”; that is, he put a broad shilling into one scale and a clipped one into the other, and seven silver groats to it before he could bring it to the weight of the broad shilling.

‘Tis said that the parliament was not half so wise in this affair about money as they might have been. They studied and computed that all the clipped money in the nation came not to above [?] millions, and having guessed how much would make up the deficiency in that sum, they laid this tax upon the houses for seven years. But now it appears since that there are above one hundred millions in the nation clipped, so that it will not be a tax of many seven years that can make out so vast a deficiency.

And people perceiving this, and finding that for the future (by reason of the narrowness of the coinage acts), that no money will be taken of them to be new minted but by weight, they will not receive any but by weight likewise. There are reckoned to be now in the Exchequer [?] millions of clipped money, and yet it is as plenty here in the country as ever, so that not half nor quarter is yet put in thither (Pryme 1870).

Pryme on 10 July, re coin-clipping and predestination:

[Mr. Ramsden] says that about nine years ago, when he was at London, there was a clipper taken, who, being a shoemaker by trade, wrought at the aforesaid art openly in his shop, singing aloud, “I shall ne’er go the sooner, I shall ne’er go the sooner to the Stygian ferry.” Thus he did for some two days together, but on the third he was taken, and in the next assizes hanged. He had been long at the trade, but always did it in secret; but being turned a rigid predestinarian, he believed it in vain to work any more in secret, but took it to be the very same to work in public, for no one could antedate his own death (Pryme 1870).

12 August 1696:

‘Tis said that the king looses above 1000l. per day in the excise, by reason of the ill management of the clipped money: for a great many ale houses all over the country, and some almost in every town, has given over brewing and selling of ale, because that they can get no good money for the ale that they shall sell (Pryme 1870).

13 August:

Here is very little or no new money comes yet down amongst us, so that we scarce know how to subsist. Every one runs upon tick, and those that had no credit a year ago has credit enough now, the parliament has done that which God himself could scarce do, for they have made the whole land out of love with money, so that, whether it be clipped or full weight, they know not what to do with it, etc. (Pryme 1870).

10 November:

The last week I took two or three new counterfeit sixpences, but exquisitely made, and washed with silver, being copper within. Monday was a sennight, they had many new sixpences stirring at Hull, with a Y for York on them, though they did not begin to coin such sixpences at York till the Wednesday following, so soon is our new money counterfeited, so that now they take new milled money as well as old, only by weight (Pryme 1870).

But then, on 15 January 1697:

New money begins now to be pretty plentiful, and the country people have now left off their cursing and damning parliament, and begins on the other side to praise and commend them (Pryme 1870).

On 1703/11/05 Ralph Thoresby writes:

With cousin Milner to visit Major Wyvil, (son to Sir Christopher, the author of some learned tracts against Popery.) The Major being concerned in the late [satellite] Mint at York when the old monies were called in, I desired an account of what monies were coined at the Mint, which by his books he showed me was 312,520l. Os. 6d (Thoresby 1830).

This failed reform drifted on until the Great Recoinage of 1816.

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Original

Being this day in Yorkshire I hear that a mint has come to York to coin silver tankards, plates, cups, etc. The poor people has been up in great numbers in Ratsdale [Rochdale] by reason that their clipped money would not go, and was marching in great fury to one of their parliament men’s houses, which they swore to pull down to the ground and ransack. But the gentlemen round about, getting immediate notice of it, soon pacified all by commanding that their clipped sixpences should go if not clipped within the innermost rim, and by promising that they would take care to change their little old money for great money, and suchlike, or else they would have done a great deal of mischief.

127 words.

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• Alcohol (drug) (59) ·
• Beer (34) ·
• Broughton, Lincolnshire (1) ·
• Coin Act 1696 (1) ·
• Counterfeit money (3) ·
• Credit (1) ·
• Currency in circulation (1) ·
• Great Recoinage of 1696 (1) ·
• Great Recoinage of 1816 (1) ·
• Gresham’s law (2), bad money drives out good ·
• HM Excise (3) ·
• Hammered coinage (1) ·
• Hanging (24) ·
• Lancashire (34) ·
• London (74) ·
• Methods of coin debasement (3) ·
• Milled coinage (1) ·
• Money supply (1) ·
• Pound sterling (1) ·
• Predestination (1) ·
• Pryme, Abraham de la (1671-1704) (13), Yorkshire antiquary and curate born to Huguenots: a Dutch-speaking father from Ypres and a Parisian mother ·
• Riot (22) ·
• 📌Rochdale (8), old Lancashire mill-town at the foothills of the South Pennines in the dale on the River Roch, 9.8 miles (15.8 km) northeast of Manchester ·
• Royal Mint (1) ·
• Silver coin (2) ·
• William III (9) ·

All tags.

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