![]() There were times when older coins especially were melted down to retrieve their metal as the metal was more valuable than the face value of the coin. However the disruptions to trade of the 30 years war meant that in different places the relative abundance of gold and silver as well as copper and other metals often varied thus altering the price and in some cases the value of the coins used. Needless to say this caused significant dislocation as cunning traders were able to take advantage of the mismatch in pricing but fortunately for 17th century Europeans the majority of this dislocation had occurred during the previous century and the ratio of ~15:1 was more or less fixed. In the medieval period the ratio was approximately 12:1 (i.e one unit of gold was worth 12 units of silver) but thanks to the vast discoveries of Latin American silver this ratio increased so that by the time Sir Isaac Newton was in charge of the Royal Mint in 1717 it was over 15:1. To add to this the rough ratio of gold:silver by weight gradually changed. One of the reasons why there was considerable inflation in the 16th century was the vast influx of gold and silver from the Spanish looting of the new world. Money in the 17th century was primarily based on silver coins with gold used for larger transactions and smaller coins minted from copper, brass or tin. This article is an attempt to shine some light on the issue but I would be the first to admit it does little more than outline the problem. Together it means that it is very hard to work out how much Grantville things should be sold for downtime and how much uptimers should expect to pay for things made by downtimers. For a modern reader all this is compounded by the changes in the relative costs of different things. About the only sure thing was that no one used a decimal system. To make it worse each system had different ratios of the numbers of coins of one denomination that made up the next. In 1632 Europe was filled with coins of varying values, issued by governments of varying degrees of trustworthiness. Professor Karl Helleiner, quoting what is purportedly an old Austrian proverb “There are two fundamental causes of madness amongst students: sexual frustration and the study of coinage.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |