W. C a r e w H a z l i t t Coinage of the European Continent

Introduction 3 1
number, as in France and Germany more particularly for
the earlier stages of our inquiry, was enormous, it demanded
too large a space to admit every one into the
alphabetical arrangement, but no locality of any consequence
has been overlooked either in our Catalogue or our Chart.
It is quite necessary to remark that others than the rulers
of the several states struck money within their confines for
currency there or elsewhere. Wiirtemburg, to cite a typical
example, has at present within its territory a single mint ;
formerly it had at least fifty.
con-
The contrast between ancient and modern political
ditions cannot be more forcibly exemplified than by the radical
change which has been accomplished in the laws of monetary
production. The want or absence of consolidation in
this respect, which survived the great revolutionary crisis of
1789, was an inheritance from the militarism of the Romans,
and was favoured and extended by the bias and demands of
the feudal system. The successive dynasties which swayed
the Continent in and after the Middle Ages found it necessary
to propitiate the towns and the clergy; the coinage of
each locality was a question in which the emperor or king, the
bishop, the lord, and the municipality claimed to have a voice
and a share : and a variety of coexistent pretensions was
constantly traversed and entangled by abuse and usurpation.
The committal of the most ancient mediaeval mints to
the superintendence of ecclesiastics was necessitated by the
absence of the culture required to transfer Latin legends and
mottoes to the dies with accuracy on the part of the lay
folk ;
and the employment of a dead language in a state of
barbarous decadence as a vehicle for conveying to the people
at large the meaning of the engraved characters on the
money intended for their common use was in perfect keeping
with the habit of rendering all public acts and documents
by the same means incomprehensible to every one who was
not a scholar or a clerk in orders. The imperfect knowledge
of the mechanism of the coining processes may be sufficient
to account for the faulty presentment of the type on many
early pieces, which, so far as they go, are clerically e^cact ;