In 1124, something was clearly amiss.

all the moneyers who were in England should be deprived of their limbs, that was the right hands of each and their stones below; that was because the man who had a pound could not buy a penn’orth at a market. And the bishop Roger of Salisbury sent all over England and commanded them all that they should come to Winchester at Christmas. Then when they came there they were seized one by one and each deprived of the right hand and of the stones below. All this was done inside twelve nights; and it was all very proper because they had done for all the land with their great fraud, which they all paid for.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (1124)

Right then, money was not working. And, as the Chronicle dwells on in perhaps a little too much detail, somebody had to pay. But if it gave the moneyers something to contemplate, it gives us plenty to think about as well.

Cash clearly mattered. While some bartering might go on - one good or service being exchanged for another - this was a heavily cash economy. The moneyers played an important role. Wealth moved between its different forms more freely. If need be, the silver in your broach could be melted down and reshaped into coins which could be more easily exchanged than the jewellery. Moneyers, usually found in your nearest town, would do this for a fee and, at times, a slice for the king. The Crown would provide the dies - one each for the front and back of the coin - through which the imprint would be struck, together with instructions for the weight of each coin. Every so often, the whole coinage was called in to be refreshed with a new design and specification. Often this was a way of raising money for the king and a lot of Danegeld was raised this way in the early eleventh century. This was also a handy way of flushing out people’s savings. If your rainy day stash was in the jar under the floor then you need to dig it out and get it up to date. It helped keep wealth liquid.

This system relied on a lot of working parts and was pretty advanced for its day. How did it suddenly go wrong?

Did the moneyers get greedy? As long as the job existed moneyers have been accused of short measures of the heavier precious metal in the coined mix, or of ‘clipping’ into the coins as the edges were finished. Sharp practice no doubt went on, but it was based around taking a tiny fraction from a lot of coins. Short measure if your payment was weighed might cost you a little bit extra. What the Chronicle is describing is something much more extreme.

Collusion between the moneyers in a much larger fraud is not impossible. The Chronicle’s tale of their rounding up and punishment covers less than two weeks, including travel. It shows how quickly royal power could move, but other communication need not have been too far behind. A much bigger problem is the numbers involved. Ocean’s Two Hundred and Eleven will always struggle, and this is the kind of numbers we would need to be talking about.

Was it the king and his government at fault? Unlikely. Henry understood money and it is one of the things he is most associated with. When his father died, Henry received a cash fortune but no land. When he reappears on the scene in 1100 it is riding to seize the Winchester treasury as his brother lay newly dead in the New Forest. As Henry himself dies thirty-five years later his treasury is full, tax revenues were as high as they would be for half a century. He brought in the Exchequer in its first recognisable form, had Domesday Book counties updated, filled Pipe Rolls with the record of tax receipts and kept justices in the field to survey his rights and revenues. Henry’s nobles owed him £70,000 between them. Money bought power - it bought off his brother Robert Curthose and it bought the dynastic marriages that Henry so desperately sought. Even the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s warm feelings towards Henry on his death were expressed in terms of cold hard cash: "no man dared say anything but good to whoever carried their load of gold and silver.” To throw it all away would be nothing short of a moment of madness.

Which leaves circumstances that were thrust upon all concerned.

The Chronicle also reports heavy floods in 1124, followed by hardship and famine. Fields were flooded and bridges and other infrastructure washed away. If there are no goods to buy because the food or cloth is simply not there, then all the money in the world will still be of little use and so little value. A short but incredibly hard spike in inflation looks to have hit some or all of the kingdom, ebbing away as a fresh and successful harvest came in the following year.

This may be too easy to be the whole answer, though. You may have struggled to get an explanation of inflation and its economic effects from even the most hardened royal administrator in the early twelfth century, but they were familiar with bad harvests, natural disasters and the hardships that followed them. Chiselling moneyers were part of life, but God’s wrath came and went.

This may be a sign that conditions had been much better in the years before 1124. God was pleased and memories of the bad times faded. The old Anglo-Saxon administration, carefully preserved by the Norman kings, always provided a good institutional memory, and things cannot have got that much better that smaller scale shortage had disappeared completely.

This difference this time came from further afield. A butterfly may have flapped its wings in China, but closer to home the ties between Christian Europe and the newly conquered Holy Land had started to bed in after the First Crusade. Robert Curthose had returned to Normandy with Eastern treasure in 1100, and a stream of crusaders, pilgrims and traders had vastly increased access to a wealthy part of the world that sat near still richer trade routes. Wealth flowed back into Europe and this could be turned into cash. As more money chased broadly the same amount of goods - fewer in a bad year - prices go up. The inflation that followed 1124’s flooding may simply have caused a problem already bubbling away to boil over.

So the storm was ridden out and on the face of it Henry did not need to look back as once again the money rolled in. But he may have had that moment of madness after all.

This marks the point where recoinages stop to be replaced by an immobilised type. From 1125 fewer than half the moneyers are still in their posts, however diminished. If never that popular, the moneyers were a regulated part of a long tradition that had significant and valuable knowledge and expertise and some of that was lost. Now, rather than coins being ‘reset’ every so often to a required value, you would just need more of them as prices increased in relation to the wealth in the economy. In some ways this marks the definite start of the feeling that it was always cheaper in the old days. Royal government lost an important string to its bow and, while their numbers may have gone up, we now need to be very careful to ask what those numbers would buy you.

Economic storms are hard to understand. There is no wind or rain or flames to point to, but the damage is there all the same. Someone, the wisdom goes, must have caused this, and this time the government’s response was the envy of people caught up in these storms ever since. “We’ll teach you” is often the response and this time they did. In the longer term it is hard to avoid the thought that they may have cut of their, well, let’s say nose to spite their face.

Bibliography

• Hodges, Richard (1991) The Anglo-Saxon Achievement. Bristol, Bristol Classical Press
• ed. Swanton, Michael (2000) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. London, Phoenix Press