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

54 The Coins of Europe
production under any circumstances. It therefore followed
that the more the mint-master debased his issues, the greater
was the revenue arising to his employer, whether a secular
lord, an ecclesiastical dignitary, or a township. It seems to
have been, so far, very reasonably and naturally a constant
incidence of the surrender of a mint by the lord, if not by
the Crown, that a proportion of the surplus after the clearance
of expenses was settled on the original feoffee ;
and
long after the mediaeval period, in the closing years of the
sixteenth century, the directors or lessees of the mint at
Montpellier are found engaging to give the seigneur of
Damville 15,000 gold ecus to induce him to close a seat of
coinage which he had opened in the vicinity, and which, so
far as we can learn, was on a very modest scale. The value
of the vested interest was presumably considerable, since
this was a political juncture, when private individuals were
taking advantage of the general disorder in France to strike
money in all directions on their own account, and the removal
of one competitor was apt to favour the rise of others. But
during centuries, apart from special circumstances, the coinage
was regarded and employed as a method of raising funds ;
and the difference between the outlay and the income varied
with the amount of central control or the financial needs of
the proprietor. The deplorable spectacle which so much
of the foreign currency,
till we approach the middle of the
seventeenth century, presents, is largely due to the free and
unscrupulous depreciation by personages in authority of
all such species of money as lent themselves to the object
or repaid the process. The billon types afforded the
greatest temptation to the speculator, who was usually precluded
from striking gold, and could gain
little by tampering
with copper. The relative impurity of the metal was not easily
detected, and the current rate remained unchanged and this
;
circumstance may be one way of explaining the wide prevalence
on the Continent in former days of plated currency.
A survey of the whole range of European coins convinces
us that each region, enjoying the privilege of a mint,
was a law to itself, and that the sole check on a perfect