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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 3759079, member: 93416&quot;]Yes, I judge these coins are part of a big and very complicated picture.&nbsp; England almost always maintained its coinage better than its continental neighbours, and in 1666 England abolished all seigniorage and made all gold and silver&nbsp; coin &quot;full bodied&quot;.&nbsp; So its interesting to see this bid for the English throne, backed by France and the Papacy, was almost entirely fiat.</p><p><br /></p><p>Readers should I think bear in mind that Adam Smith believed England made a mistake on the general matter, and commended France for maintaining a seigniorage on coinage (about 8% as I recall).&nbsp; Indeed in 1816 England changed its policy and put a seigniorage back on silver, at 6% I think.</p><p><br /></p><p>There was also&nbsp; huge row early in the 18th century over the projected Woods halfpennies for Ireland.&nbsp; This is much misrepresented in all sorts of literature.&nbsp; Swift clearly stirred Irish nationalism against the Woods coinage.&nbsp; The truth about its intrinsic value seems to be that English halfpennies were about 50% over valued against intrinsic, while Woods Irish issue was about 60% over valued.&nbsp; So there was a small difference, which Woods claimed was to do with distribution costs.&nbsp; Swift&#039;s account of the matter was however a gross and quite deliberate propagandistic misrepresentation.</p><p><br /></p><p>Those carried away by nationalist sentiment did not notice that Swift had been associated with the Tory English gvt which blocked all copper issue under Ann, and I judge the real target of his propaganda was the English Whig administration which was pushing out huge amounts of copper coin in England.&nbsp; (Samuel) Johnson&#039;s comments on &quot;nationalism&quot; and &quot;scoundrels&quot; may well have had Swift in mind.</p><p><br /></p><p>Around the same time another Irishman, Berkeley, made an amazingly accurate recommendation for what looks very much like the post 1947 Keynsian monetary system. Except for the fact that, if Bankers had followed the advice Berkeley gave around 1730, on mortgage backed fiat paper, we would have avoided the 2008 crash.............</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyhow, I am afraid that museum notice board that Christian chose to post earlier looks like a modern piece of propaganda to me, so am curious to know what the Timmins book says concerning the economic history of this matter.</p><p><br /></p><p>Paul Withers was pretty grumpy about the new Timmins book, but does not touch on the economic content, if there is any.&nbsp; Is Timmins inline with that museum suggestion?</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="http://www.galata.co.uk/assets/uploaded/docs/37.pdf" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.galata.co.uk/assets/uploaded/docs/37.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.galata.co.uk/assets/uploaded/docs/37.pdf</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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