The Mint: A Brief Introduction

Founded in AD 886, the Royal Mint supplies the nation’s coinage. One of the most important government institutions of the early modern period, it had been housed in the Tower of London since 1279. Henry VIII was the first monarch to alter the amount of precious metal in the country’s currency to alleviate financial difficulties in ‘The Great Debasement’ of 1544. From then on, financial interventions were used by both royals and parliament to increase state revenue and maintain political control.

By the end of the seventeenth century, state finances were in a very poor state, and the Crown was unable to pay its debts in 1672 (‘The Great Stop of the Exchequer’), bankrupting many of its lenders. When the Dutch Prince William of Orange was invited to take up the English throne in 1688, the state needed cash to fund fighting against Catholic Jacobite supporters in Scotland and Ireland, as well as the French. The ‘War of Grand Alliance’ was unlike any other England had faced, with coalition campaigns against Louis XIV fought across Europe and its seas, North America and India, requiring huge investment in field armies and the Navy, putting immense strain on the new state.

At home, there was a crisis in the coinage itself. The Mint had long produced hand-struck coins of hammered metals that were irregular and relatively easy to counterfeit and ‘clip’ (snip off the edges of the metal). Good quality coin was either being horded by merchants to pay international trade or sold as bullion in Europe where the value of the metal had risen above the face value of the coinage – an example of Gresham’s Law, or ‘bad money drives out good.’ There was a critical shortage of trustworthy silver, and business in England was grinding to a halt.

In 1695, the government asked for advice on dealing with the crisis from a range of financial and intellectual experts. Among them the natural philosophers John Locke and Isaac Newton offered their theories. Newton argued for a devaluation of silver currency, but Locke claimed that this would damage the government’s credit and the face value of the coin should match its silver content. The government eventually sided with Locke and ordered a complete recoinage to the old silver standard.

The Great Recoinage was already underway by the time Newton joined the Mint as Warden in March 1696. All silver money and plate in the country was to be brought to the Mint, melted down, repressed and reissued. Labourers worked hard at furnaces, rolling mills and coin-press machines from midnight to 4am, six days a week but, led by an inefficient and corrupt Master, Thomas Neale, the task seemed impossible to complete and even worsened the crisis.

Newton rescued the Recoinage. He studied the Mint’s history and workings, analysing the skills and working practices of the men producing the coins and drastically improved productivity. He oversaw the establishment of a network of provincial Mints in strategically important trade towns and ports, rooting out corruption and inefficiency across the whole operation.

He dedicated over a decade to hunting, interviewing and prosecuting counterfeiters, building up a local web of information and surveillance. He extracted confessions through threats and bribes and visited likely informers in Newgate gaol and other dens of iniquity – while occasionally paying for clothing so that newly compliant witnesses could appear credible before judges and juries.

Newton used his extensive knowledge of chemistry to ensure that the silver and gold produced under his care in the Tower of London was of the correct quality, something which was routinely tested by the Goldsmith’s Company in the ‘Trial of the Pyx’, a semi-public examination in which they compared a randomly selected sample of coins produced by the Mint workers with a ‘test’ coin produced by the Company.

It is believed Newton’s effectiveness as an officer of the Mint saved the country thousands of pounds, rescuing the credit of the monarch and the nation during a period of immense political upheaval and economic need, including the Act of Settlement (1701), the Union of England and Scotland in 1707 and the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Newton should therefore be considered one of the most important government officials operating from the reign of William III to the end of the reign of George I.