THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

CONTINENT OF EUROPE
ment. We take up the Frankish deniers and oboles
of Charlemagne and his successors to the end of the
tenth century, and place them .side by side with their
equivalents under the Capetian rulers and French arti-
ficers, and the contrast is impressive enough ; the latter
constitute an unsatisfactory and repellent array of
poorly engraved and struck examples on billon blanks,
originally washed with a solution of silver or white
metal, but as a rule divested by hard wear of every
trace of the plating process.
It is not till we arrive at the great reforms accom-
plished under Louis IX., about the middle of the
thirteenth century, that we meet with any creditable
specimens of numismatic art, and that after a length-
ened interval of sterile monotony there comes not onlv
a new era in the silver coinage, but the singular pheno-
menon of gold types wholly differing from those almost
simultaneously instituted by Italy and Germany, where
the Venetian or Florentine models prevailed. The
broad pieces struck under the authority of Louis about
1250 did undoubted honour to those concerned in pro-
ducing them ; and his successors of the Capetian and
Valesian lines maintained the character and standard
of this branch of the national coinage, which lasted
down to the middle of the seventeenth century, when
it gave place to the lonis-cTor and its divisions and
multiples in 1640, in common with the silver currency
—the ecu cTargent and its fractions—the copper remain-
ing unchanged, till the following reign substituted the
Hard and other denominations.
145 k