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MONETAGIUM. 105mintage (monetagium) levied on cities and shires (quodcapiebatur per civitates et per comitatus)," that is tosay, a tax paid to William I by the cities and shiresof the country in order to retain the right of havingcoins issued at the provincial mints 12 this would be an;usurpation as the cities or shires had in the Confessor'stime the use of local mints without paying a tax for it,and therefore the removal of the tax by Henry I wouldbe a concession in perfect agreement with the otherclauses of his Charter of Liberties in which he renouncesthe Nor-usurpations of his two predecessors.Let us imagine the assumption correct thatman and English systems of Monetagium areidentical.How can it even so affect the changes of types ? It hasalready been shown that the evil for the remedy ofwhich the people of Normandy undertook to pay twelvepence every three years was the debasement of theweight and quality of the coinage. A glance at thepapers quoted above (see p. 103, note 10) will showclearly how bad the Norman money had become ;thecoins are irregular in shape, almost illegible, andthe really important point of metal hopelessly base;the types were not undergoing frequent changes on the;contrary, the temple faade and the cross with pellets orannulets remained as obverse and reverse types, andbecame more and more degraded until they were scarcelyrecognizable. It is therefore quite certain that were theEnglish and Norman taxes identical it could not be usedto refer to alterations of the coin-types.Again, supposing the tax to be identical in both12 It is thus identical with the payments de Moneta which arefrequent in Domesday; Sir Henry Ellis (General Introduction toDomesday, p. 175, note 1)was of this opinion.