The Great Recoinage

On 13 January 1696, the Houses of Parliament passed the ‘Act for Remedying the Ill State of the Coin of the Kingdom’ — the government had, after much debate, decided to melt down and reissue all the silver coin, plate and bullion in the country according to the old, Elizabethan standard. The deadline for depositing the old hammered coins was set to July 1696.

The ‘Great Recoinage’ was already underway by the time Newton arrived at the Mint. Newly-minted coins were being produced by new mechanical techniques invented and tested earlier in the century by the Frenchman Pierre Blondeau: screw presses allowed for intricate stamps and milled edges which made coins more uniform and difficult to counterfeit. Workers and subcontractors were sworn to secrecy, but the process was mired by technical difficulties, mismanagement and accusations of corruption, and required a lot of local negotiation. In his role, Newton undertook to improve the efficiency and security of the Recoinage: he gathered documents, ran experiments, argued with the Board of Ordnance and the Lord Lieutenant of the Tower over shared forges, horses and space, and defended the work of the Mint against the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. Above all, he sought to reduce the levels profiteering and waste by subcontractors, financiers and Mint employees.

Newton also oversaw the provincial mints set up in Bristol, Exeter, Norwich, York and Chester, to aid with the Recoinage. These locations were strategic, highly dependent on international trade and important places to keep afloat during the economic crisis. The Clerk of the Royal Mint, Hopton Haynes, claimed these Mints were necessitated by the ‘great clamours and uneasiness of people in all parts of the Nation.’ The Treasury had been flooded with petitions from towns across the country begging for Mints that would, it was believed, create jobs, inject much needed currency into local markets and keep the peace.

But these provincial mints were costly to set up, difficult to manage, and caused friction not only in Parliament but also with the Corporation of Moneyers, who refused to endorse or train coiners outside of London. The Royal Mint was therefore reliant on local networks of successful governors, administrators, contractors and merchants (as well as their friends and families) to not only bring the silver in, but also to record, remelt and reissue it.

This stood in tension with the overall aims of secrecy and standardization that were required to ensure the success of recoinage program. To cope with this, Newton and his assistants, Haynes and John Fauquier, together created a sophisticated bureaucratic system to monitor these additional mints, requiring provincial Mint clerks to submit their diaries and records of incomings, output, wastage and progress for the central record[1]. Out of the £6.8 million pounds of silver money produced during the Great Recoinage, a quarter was coined by the Country Mints.

From 1696 until the end of 1699, the London Mint and the temporary County Mints of York, Bristol, Exeter, Chester, and Norwich, contributed towards the Great Recoinage. With much of the hammered silver coins in circulation being clipped or worn, and moreover having a face value less than the actual bullion, an effort was made to replace these with newly minted coins, with milled edges. The chart below is based on the draft for a table Newton included with his letter of 20 January 78. The letter was written in response to Secretary of the Treasury William Lowndes' letter of 17 January in which the latter requested an account of all the moneys coined during the Great Recoinage of 1696-99 and afterwards.