Inside the Mint
Inside the Mint buildings themselves, gold was melted in small earthenware pots and silver in large iron vats that held a third of a ton, refined over charcoal fires. The liquid metal was then ladled with long spoons into sand molds, to be cast into little bars. Moneyers then squeezed these bars down to coin thinness by passing them three times through revolving cylinders of iron or steel, powered by a four-horse mill in the cellar beneath the room.
Disks of the proper size were punched out of the sheet metal by ‘forcible engines’, weighed, and then flattened and shaped with hammers and tongs. The discs were then softened by blanching through ‘nealing’ – heating the coins to a dull red glow in a furnace – and boiling, before going through the secret milling machine of Pierre Blondeau: the disks were rolled edgeways against engraved silver plates, making them more circular and creating a milled or inscribed edge. This was the machine which everyone at the Mint had to swear to keep secret.
Finally, the coins were brought to the screw presses to be minted. This press had two horizontal arms, each loaded with a hundredweight of lead at its tip, at waist height. As a Moneyer inserted a blank between the two dies through an aperture in the foot of the press, four labourers pulled the arms violently, bringing the central pillar down hard, and the blank was smashed between two dies. These great machines could strike nearly a coin every two seconds according to Newton, but the Moneyers put the average stroke at three a minute, but the strain was so great this pace could only be kept up for fifteen minutes at most.[1]
During the Recoinage of 1696, the Mint was expanded to cope with its sudden, heavy workload. The Mint had to evict the garrison of soldiers from their buildings (forcing them to sleep three-in-a-bed in the Tower barracks), turn the Comptroller’s garden into a melting house, and bring in much more machinery. Work began at 4am and finished at midnight and made a huge amount of noise - Hopton Haynes described how nearly three hundred workmen were crowded into the narrow confines of the Mint, and fifty horses turned the ten mills that were almost constantly working.[2] During this period, the Mint spent nearly £700 hauling manure away.[3]
Even during regular working days, it could be difficult to maintain order within the Mint. The workforce was made up by various contractors, guildsmen, and royal appointees, living both inside and outside the Tower walls, and operating under different authorities and privileges. As Master, Newton left much of the day-to-day oversight to the Deputy he had appointed, John Francis Fauquiere, but he would still step in to discipline the workers upon occasion: in 1710, for example, he disestablished both the Smith and the Die-sinker because the last holder, in Newton’s words, ‘imposed upon me and behaved himself to me with great insolence.’[4]
The Mint Board (consisting of the Master, the Comptroller and the Warden) met every Wednesday and Saturday to review the daybooks, examine the records of the Pyx, supervise maintenance, and take up whatever business arose.[5] The absence of any similar records for earlier times leads one to conclude that Newton inaugurated the meetings – even changing the date of the weekly Royal Society meetings to do so.