Dr Kat and "The Great Debasement"

hello and welcome back to the channel if you're new here hi you're very welcome this is reading the past and I'm dr. Kat Henry the eighth is famous or rather infamous for many things that he did during his life and rain but there is one thing that I think gets overlooked and it's the reason that he earns the relatively odd nickname of old copper notes now if you're looking at the title of this video or perhaps if you know where old copper nose comes from then you will know that today we're looking at the great debasement for the general circulation currency of medieval and early modern England the most popular metal used was silver indeed we still see traces of this fact today the British Pound is known as the pound sterling and this relates to the fact that originally it was minted of course in sterling silver but at this time there was also circulating gold coinage and they took the following forms there was the royal the angel the sovereign first seen in 1489 the crown which was first issued in gold under Henry the eighth and the unite if we wish to grasp just how big of a deal or the debasement of the currency was then first and foremost we need to confront and contend with the fact that our medieval and early modern counterparts interacted with and viewed money and currency in a profoundly different way than we do in my purse I may have metal money paper money increasingly in the UK a plastic polymer kind of money I accept that if a note has five pounds written on it that is what it is worth that I can take into a shop and the shopkeeper will also agree that that is what is worth that if something is marked as five pounds I will take you to the counter and I'll exchange one thing for the other at no point do I expect that the note itself that the materials in it are worth five pounds similarly I'm have an a Lloyd metal pound in my hand I do not expect that the base cost of the metals making up that alloy coin are actually worth a pound and that's the difference I associate face value with what the coin is worth I do not expect face value to match value of materials and that's where we differ in the medieval and early modern world if you have a bag of silver and it's worth a pound you expect that it will weigh a pound that you can turn out your bag of coins into a scale and it will weigh a literal pound you can then take those coins and melt them down separate out the various parts that have made up that coin you expect predominantly it will be silver with some alloy added to it to stabilize the metal to ensure that it's strong enough to be used as currency but principally you're going to expect to have melted in almost a pound of silver problems begin to arise when the amount of stabilizing alloy in that silver coin increases particularly if the general public doesn't know if they aren't aware if they then find out that the silver value in their coin that it's level of silver has been diminished they will suddenly see their coin as being worth less maybe even fully worthless and this then jeopardizes both national and international trading when Harry v8 ascended the throne in 1509 he did not simply inherit his father's crown he also got his currency and in the case of Homer in the seventh this coin was particularly fine no trace of that dangerous debasement here at least not yet almost at once as were standard Henry the Eighth has the coin reissued re minted this time bearing his face and I can that's particularly telling then as now our currency bares the head of our monarch upon it therefore it's symbolic of both state and also king or queen when the currency is strong therefore it speaks volumes about the monarch on it and the state they preside over come if that coin becomes weak distrusted the cost of debasement then that may have less positive connotations for the king or queen on the coin and for the nation they preside over although Henry seventh did leave behind a remarkably strong coin that doesn't necessarily mean he's gone down in history as a popular monarch rather he is famed for being an excellent bookkeeper some people say he's more accountant than king that he wants to sign off on every item of spending done by the courts he looks cheap parsimonious as tight as two coats of paint Henry the 8th is the diametric opposite he likes to spend and he likes to spend big lavish entertainments and palaces and clothing and most of all war wars are expensive and Henry the eighth's loves them so this is a problem as he fights these wars against the French England becomes impoverished and it's up to his Council to find a way out of the mess one way they can do this is to just make more money but they don't have any more gold or silver within England so they're going to add more base metal to the gold and silver coins they already have they make more money by debasing the currency that's already within the realm for approximately 400 years England had maintained 92.5 percent purity for sterling but with Henry's debasement the purity of coins gradually dropped to 75 percent then to 50 percent to 33 percent and finally to 25 percent a 1551 issue under Edward the 6th contained only 17 percent of the silver contained in pre debasement issues in his book sterling Nicholas Mayhew thoroughly lays out the background and policy of debasement in henrician England he then comes to a conclusion in which he thoroughly castigates henry and his ministers for engaging in this policy he says the following in 1526 Henry the 8th reduced the metal content of his gold coinage white percent and of his silver coinage by eleven percent reductions of this sort were very much in line with late medieval English mint practice counting 1526 there had been four such reductions since twelve seventy nine on average about sixty years apart unlike the debasement that had taken place in medieval europe often after a parliamentary discussion Henry's fifty forties debasement was introduced secretly because any public debate would certainly have exposed its fraudulent nature the tudor basement remains the single greatest fraud carried out by any English government on its own people the trauma scarred the collective memory for generations to come there can be no doubt that the whole debasement experience dealt a severe blow to public confidence in money continued high prices may have been a result of a flight from generally distrusted money into goods alterations the value of the pound sterling not only affected prices at home they also affected the value of sterling abroad perhaps you have seen film or TV productions set in the past in them you may have seen somebody testing a coin by biting into it now do you assume they are checking how hard the coin is to make sure that it's correct because it's hard and difficult to bite because in fact they're really checking how soft the coin is coins with the requisite amount of precious metal as opposed to alloy will be a little bit tacky chewy you'll be able to bite into them and perhaps leave a tooth impression as the level of alloy increases that capacity to bite into them isn't possible anymore it's also the reason why Henry earns the nickname old copper nose with the value and amount of silver in the coin diminishing and the copper alloys increasing then on the high points of the coin particularly places like the Kings nose the wear and tear starts have an effect being constantly handled exchange for goods and services placed in pockets and pouches and purses the softer silver starts to wear away and what's left behind is the base copper II metal the Kings deception that's being perpetrated to get his people becomes visible through his old copper nose as soon as England's trades people and shopkeepers realize that the English coin has been debased they are going to alter their practices if we take for the time the enormous lehigh fee of a pound for some goods or service this might be handed over in a purse the tradesman or shopkeeper goes away happy once they figure out the baseness happening they realized that this pound in a purse is nowhere near a pound of silver or that they can't trust that it's anywhere near a pound of silver they're going to charge more they probably don't have the skill or even the inclination to test every coin within that bag they may not have the ability to do so and so if they don't they're going to protect themselves aren't they on top of that because they do not know due to the deception just what the level of debasement has been they are going to overestimate how little silver might be in the coin all of a sudden a pounds worth of goods or services is being charged at a pound and a half maybe even two pounds and that problem only increases when we think about foreign trading England's merchants overseas never had to exchange currencies everybody's working in silver and/or gold and everybody expects that face value is going to match material value in coin as soon as rumors start to spread across Europe and the world of the insufficiency of England's coins foreign merchants aren't going to trust it and they're going to do the same thing they're going to charge more for the goods than English merchants wish to import and the knock-on effect there is of course that when those Goods come into England English people buying them are going to be charged even more than that inflation is going to reach screeching levels and so the general population of England are going to be feeling the pinch they're going to be impoverished by this frankly con job perpetrated against them by their own king despite the fact that those who matured a machine of government would show themselves frequently to be expert spin-doctors making one thing seem like quite another even they could not come to terms with or spin the disastrous reputation of England's currency both at home and abroad the only real solution was a recoiling to deal with the basement to call back in all of the English coin to the mints of which there were many up and down the country to take that coin and melt it down to separate base metal from precious metal of course a small percentage less than 10% of base metal would have to go back into the precious metal in order to make it function appropriately as a coin because as I said earlier gold and silver is simply too soft on their own to function in that way this was the solution put forward by Sir Thomas Smith during the reign of the boy King Edward the sick and I talked about Sir Thomas Smith and his views on debasement and many other things in a video which only linked in a card up here at this time ever the six government is being run by his uncle protector Somerset Somerset and Smith fall out massively on debasement as the main topic Smith's desire to see the recoiling and Somerset its decision that this is not going to happen means that the two men are perpetually at odds the recoiling should not occur until the reign of Elizabeth the first and even then it's not going to be without issue while recoil it is absolutely necessary to ensure the security stability and impression of England's currency both at home and abroad I can't imagine that it would have been massively popular you are commanded to bring your currency to your local mint and it is a command it's not an option let's go back to that pound of silver you turn up with a pound of silver let's say that it's been debased at 50 percent so it's 50 percent pure silver and 50 percent base metal and you've got a pound of it you take it to your mint it's melted down and so what is given back to you it's no longer a pound but half pound that must have felt like a very expensive forced day trip mustn't it Elizabeth the first came to the throne in 1558 two years later in 1560 she gave her consent for the recoilless to begin debasement would be dealt with England's currency would be restored to its former glory and I wonder if this policy of hers is one of the reasons why her reign has gone down in history as a golden age for our nation I also think it's telling that the Tudor dynasty is time when the throne is bookended with two monarchs Henry the seventh and Elizabeth the first both of whom are famed for their financial acumen if we're being unkind they have both been referred to as being parsimonious or as tightest two coats of paint if you will certainly they don't seem keen to spend money or what they see as frivolous endeavors Elizabeth tried to avoid spending money on war as much as humanly possible but I'd love to know what you think of this video what are your thoughts on the great debasement and its aftermath let me know in the comment section down below or you come and find me over on my social media I'll leave links to my Instagram and Twitter in the description box follow me there and we can continue this conversation I do hope you enjoyed this video and found it useful if you did then please let me know by hitting the thumbs up please also subscribe to this channel and while you're there hit the bell icon next the subscribe button so that YouTube tells you and I've next uploaded I hope you're going to have a great day whatever you're doing and I look forward to speaking to you in my next video take care of yourselves bye bye for now [Music] you [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 15,754

Rating: 4.976089 out of 5

Keywords: The Great Debasement, Henry VIII, Tudor, Henry VII, Sir Thomas Smith, Edward VI, Protector Somerset, Elizabeth I, Education, Literature, Culture, History, Early Modern, Renaissance

Id: tyQl3lMSulg

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 13 2019