florin

On 27 January 1344 Edward III authorised a new gold coin. England had been a silver-currency country; gold coins were something you encountered in trade with Italy, France and the Low Countries. The intention behind the new coin was straightforward. It should be good English money at home, and it should also be accepted abroad, so that English merchants were not forever dealing at the mercy of somebody else's coinage.

The model was obvious. A gold coin first struck in Florence in 1252 had, by way of a French version of it, become a standard that merchants across Europe recognised and trusted. It contained about 3.50 grams (0.1 oz) of fine gold — fine meaning the pure gold, setting aside whatever alloy was mixed in for hardness. Because everyone knew what that coin weighed, everyone knew roughly what it was worth. Edward's coin took the same name, florin, and was struck at twice that nominal weight: 108 grains of fine gold, a little under seven grams. Its official value, the price the crown declared it to be worth in English money, was six shillings.

That is where the trouble sat. A coin's official value and the market value of the metal inside it are two separate numbers, and they only stay together if someone has done the arithmetic carefully. Here they did not agree. The coin was, as the accounts of it put it plainly, wrongly tariffed — the tariff being the rate at which the crown said the coin should pass. Merchants who dealt in gold every day could weigh the coin, price the metal, and compare that with six shillings. The comparison did not favour taking the coin. So they would not take it.

This is worth being concrete about, because it is the whole story. A merchant asked to accept a gold coin at six shillings has a simple test: could he do better by treating it as a lump of gold rather than as money? If the metal in his hand is worth more on the open market than the price stamped on it, accepting it at face value means handing over goods and losing on the exchange. Nobody does that twice. Coins in that position tend not to circulate; they get weighed, hoarded, or melted down and sold as bullion.

The reaction was quick, and so was the retreat. The coin was almost immediately withdrawn from circulation. In August 1344, after only a few months in existence, it was replaced by the gold noble, which held 7.80 grams (0.3 oz) of gold and was valued at six shillings and eightpence. The noble worked. It stayed in use and became the foundation of English gold coinage, which is the clearest evidence that the problem with its predecessor was not the idea of an English gold coin but the specific numbers attached to it.

What survives is therefore a coin that barely functioned as money. Examples are in collections rather than in circulation, and one is in the British Museum. Because the issue lasted months rather than decades, and because coins that are worth more melted than spent tend to get melted, survivals are not what you would expect from a normal medieval English issue. That scarcity is itself a record of the failure: the coins were not kept because they were treasured, they were destroyed because they were undervalued.

It is worth being careful about how much we claim to know. The authorising date and the technical specification are recorded. Precisely who refused the coins, in what quantities they were struck, and how many were melted rather than returned to the mint are matters where the evidence is much thinner than the tidy narrative suggests. The standard account — wrongly tariffed, therefore unacceptable to merchants, therefore withdrawn — is a summary of an outcome, not a detailed account of a process. The outcome is not in doubt. The mechanics, in detail, largely are.