Britain’s coins of the realm are just mint (From Gazette & Herald)

Britain’s coins of the realm are just mint

12:30pm Thursday 20th August 2009

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IT is difficult to imagine Britain without its standard issue of coins. All are made in the Royal Mint to an exacting quality and design and in the view of all of us, they are instantly recognisable as we go about our daily routine. We exchange them for goods and services and seldom question their authenticity.

Certainly counterfeit coins can be in circulation but fortunately most are quickly identified as being valueless and so we should hand them over to the authorities such as the police or a bank. It is dishonest and illegal to put them into a church collection plate, charity box or parking meter!

It may seem odd, therefore, that at one stage of our history there were over 70 mints in England alone, more than now exist in the entire world. Not every country has its own mint, the output at one mint producing several nations’ coinage.

Gold and silver have been coined in this country since before the arrival of the Romans while the earliest mint may have been in Greece during the 8th century BC. It was used for the coining of gold, silver and electrum, an alloy of gold and silver. The Greeks introduced the skill of coining to the Romans and it quickly spread east into India and other parts of Asia.

In this country efforts to standardise the issue of coins appear to have begun during the 12th century when officials were appointed to supervise the coinage on behalf of the king.

Later, Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was appointed Warden of the Royal Mint in 1695 and Master of the Royal Mint in 1699. His task was to carry out a thorough reform of the coinage.

The word coin comes from the wedge-shaped die used for stamping money – literally, a coin was a piece of money produced by the coin but the word has now come to be used for the piece of money itself, rather than that which made it.

For centuries, the Royal Mint was housed in the Tower of London, and in 1810 it moved to a new building on Tower Hill – it was the first public building to be lit by gas. The new Royal Mint was opened in 1968 at Llantrisant, near Cardiff, in Wales.

However, here in the north, the people had other ideas for their currency. From around the 13th century until well into the 17th, the population of the border counties of Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmoreland, all used a type of base money made from metal.

The metal was the type used for making chain mail and so the cash produced from it began to be known as maille, coming from the French word meaning a link of chain mail. The coins produced from this source were sometimes known as black money due to their colour as opposed to maille blanche which meant white money, ie that made from silver or sterling.

The term black money was widely used and it appeared in a statute of Edward III (9 Ed.3,c.4), then in 1601, one of Elizabeth I’s laws referred to it as black maille. This came to mean a type of crime that involved the demanding by menaces of goods or money – those menaces could be in the form of violence, intimidation or verbal threats.

That crime has been part of our history since the earliest times but it first appeared in statute form in 1272. At that time, freebooters who lived in the border counties carried out this crime apparently without hindrance but the problem grew so large that 250 years later, James V of Scotland sent 8000 soldiers to crush the freebooters. Many deaths resulted but this did not stop the crimes.

The term blackmail came to mean a kind of illegal rent, tax or levy imposed by criminals who lived in the border counties, and it could mean goods of any kind including base metal, corn, provisions, livestock or any other consideration that was not genuine sterling. Small farmers and stockholders became subjected to constant threats on the pretence that such payments would protect them from robbers – it was an early form of the protection racket.

Those who made these demands were working in league with robbers and so they all became known as moss troopers. Many lived rough in the marshes of the border regions and slept on moss.

Elizabeth I made it illegal for people living in the border counties to carry black maille, with death as the penalty, and it was from this that the various forms of extortion by threats or intimidation became known as blackmail. Despite repeated attempts to halt the crimes, they continued into the 18th century and it is thought the union between Scotland and England in 1707 led eventually to its decline.

In 18th and 19th century criminal legislation, the crime was known as “demanding by menaces” but the term blackmail, although in common use for such activities, was reintroduced to statutory law by the Theft Act of 1968 as the name for that particular type of crime.

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