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$$ in medieval fantasy


steph

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Hey guys !

 

For my world campaign i am looking for a realistic medieval money system. Maybe some examples would help.

 

What i mean by realistic is: a commoner never saw a gold piece in is life…. Even Silver! No DND Falvor

 

Hope i am clear english not my first language

 

Steph

 

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Be ready to do a lot of transactions in barter.

 

Also be ready to do a lot of math.

 

4 farthings to the pence

2 farthings to the halfpence

2 pence to the tuppence

3 pence to the thruppence

4 pence to the groat

6 pence to the tanner (half shilling)

12 pence to the shilling

2 shillings to the florin

2 shillings,  6 pence to the half crown

5 shillings to the crown

20 shillings to the pound (a sovereign, if an actual coin, made of gold)

21 shillings to the guinea

 

Once could also have multiple coins for the same nominal denomination, depending on what the coin is made of.   The US, for example, used to have two coins valued at $0.05...the nickel, made of, well, nickel, and the half dime, made of silver.  One could run into farther complication if some rulers in the country decided to debase their currency to make their stocks of precious metals last longer.   The old king might have made his shilling coins from proper 90% silver alloy, while the new one uses only 80% silver, hence people tend to name different prices depending on what shillings you're using to pay.  Of course, this might actually be against the new king's law, he says his shillings are just as good as the old king's shillings...

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First point: "worlds" can feature multiple different systems even in relatively small areas.

 

Assuming a medieval European baseline (big assumption): currency prevalence and usage varied radically over time and space.

 

Hoards of gold and silver were and are a real thing. Archeologists find them all the time. (Mostly fairly small). Obviously commoners aren't particularly likely to have such hoards, but still might have a stash of copper and even a bit of silver. One of the reasons for hoarding is that cash wasn't always all that useful! More generally, of course, "banking" took a long time to become a thing.

 

"Commoners" covers a lot of ground too, from serfs and slaves to prosperous free peasants. The latter are quite likely to have access to coinage, if only in a "see my previous paragraph" sense. Over time, paying rents in cash became a thing in many areas, paralleling a shift in production towards commodities to be sold rather than directly used or bartered.

 

Technically, urban populations are commoners as well. These are the most likely people to use coinage regularly. Most transactions would feature relatively small amounts.

 

Pick the flavour you want. 6th century Poland was a lot different from 15th century Venice.

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It's important to set your rough time period for the game's parallels to real medieval Europe. Depending on the time you're looking at, you'll see a different value for your money (to the extent it was used as currency); societal and environmental factors affected prices and wages, which can be evidenced by massive increases in labor wages following the Black Death, and slowly inflation began to increase wages and prices of goods, even into the Renaissance and beyond, where labor that would be worth 1d. per day would eventually be worth 1s. per day and eventually even greater wages.

 

Remember, also, that much of the medieval economy was based on the feudal system, and as such, modern economic thought does not necessarily come into play with effect to wages and monetary gains. Many individuals in a feudal system were serfs who worked a lord's manor, in exchanging labor and produce for residence, protection and the ability to farm (or otherwise work) for their own subsistence, on lands unowned by them (though by law, nearly everything a serf had access to was still property of the lord). This contract was very difficult to break on either side, and continued through the progeny of serfs. As such, the notion of wages and currency is an alien concept with respect to serfs, as much of their work was either in fulfillment of feudal contract (for which they gained non-monetary compensation), or for their own benefit (working the lord's land to provide crops for the serf and their family). The rest was likely dealt with in barter, as a serf working in the lord's fields harvesting grain, and a serf working in the lord's woods, collecting wood for fires, would each require the others' goods, and thus transactions would be in barter, rather than coin. Only during the later middle ages would it be common for serfs to sell excess produce at the market, where they would see coin in exchange for their goods.

 

In cities, you are more likely to see goods and services exchanged for coin, and at that point, you'll see far greater amounts of coinage in the hands of the populace, even commoners. As they were not directly bound by feudal contracts, and were more commonly freemen and artisans, their goods and services were more often exchanged for currency than through a barter system, due to the decreased feasibility of barter when fewer essential aspects of life were provided by a ruling lord. In such a place, a commoner may rarely see coins of high value (as they were rare for anyone to have, with denominations such as British Pounds and French Livres often serving as units of account, rather than coinage, and even when coins with higher values were minted, they were often used for bullion, rather than common currency). Pence or denier (or similar currency in other areas besides England and France) were common, and sous and shillings slowly became more common as wages and prices slowly inflated (though, due to the relative strength of the British Pound to the French Livre, the sou became commonplace much more quickly than the shilling). In most cases, however, nearly all common currency was silver, and only in the later middle ages did rarer gold coins become minted (and even then, their use outside of bullion was quite rare). As such, if you want to do a "Realistic" monetary system, you can't really avoid silver, as even British Farthings were silver (and often simply a penny cut into quarters) prior to well into the Renaissance, where copper farthings were eventually produced.

 

While I tend to abstract things more that the normal "Realistic" seeking GM, how I would tend to try a realistic currency system would be to go with a 1:20:240 currency system (for the sake of referencing denominations by name, let's call them Crowns, Solars and Pence respectively), with possibly subdivided into various coins, however that's probably more book keeping than I'd put into the game, with the only possible exception being a method to subdivide pence into halves and quarters. A penny would be the most common coin, and would be small and silver, and rarely would anyone ever see any coins as large or larger than Solars, a silver coin, which would be occasionally by the more wealthy, but rarely seen outside of that. Crowns exist as bullion and unit of account only, and do not exist in coin form. Nobles have most of their wealth in the form of land and feudal contracts with serfs, knights and vassals, and when they do have monetary gains or expenses, they are often in units of account and bullion, rather than currency. Serfs, similarly do not own much currency, as the majority of their livelihood is gained by laboring for their lord, and working for subsistence on his lands, and trade within the manor is often done through barter. Any currency in the hands of serfs is often the result of a rare serf able to leave the lords' lands to sell excess goods at the market of a nearby town. Residents of towns and cities tend to be the primary users of currency, with the average wage for an unskilled laborer being 3 pence per day, and a skilled laborer can find wages between 6 pence and several solars as a daily wage. At the low end, unskilled laborers live barely better than serfs, though they were free of feudal contract and owned property, however towards the high end, the beginnings of a new social class can be seen to be forming, of freemen who are of lower status than nobles, but have sizable wealth beyond the realm of commoners. This new class of individuals are beginning to see greater legal rights afforded to them, through laws that provide rights based on the value of property ownership, often enacted by ruling monarchs who provide these rights in exchange for political support. Such individuals deal often with solars and money of account, and will be the ones most frequently using coins other than pence.

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I'll have to agree with assault, "medieval" is a veeeery wide spectrum, never mind that most fantasy settings can be considered post-medieval anyway when it comes to economy, transport, etc., even before factoring in D&D-isms.

 

And on the other hand, there's an almost comical emphasis on pretty early economics when this gets debated on internet fora (or when "realistic" sourcebooks/supplements are published), which makes it seem like the Domesday book was the rule for centuries, all across Europe (nobody seems to care about the Byzantine empire anyway). The only thing I can surmise from that is that some colleages treat post-Hastings England like the "History" Channels treats WW2...

 

Given a somewhat standard fantasy setting, where your traveling adventurers aren't utterly exotic (i.e. you've got good roads, inns etc.), you can't just settle accounts with barter and tally sticks, so coinage will be common, especially when we're talking about cities and larger settlements, and not just manorial holdings.

 

Never mind that a piece of hacksilver isn't worth that much, and the ubiquitous "copper coins" can be considered more of a D&D-ism than silver in the hand of "commoners".

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And note that the base coin of Harn is still the silver penny. 240 of which are a gold crown (?), about the yearly wage of a servant (or the yearly fee a miller has to pay). If I remember correctly, it's been a while since I browsed through HarnManor. Harn tends mostly towards the earlier medieval economy I've ranted about. (Which is one source of its realism, you won't find 8th century Vikings raiding 15th century Venetians there)

 

Fief is a very solid standalone, systemless sourcebook that (IIRC) encompasses the 11th - 14th century.

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Just to add to the chorus, the idea that "commoners never saw a silver piece, let a lone a gold one" is completely not based in history.  As already noted, archeologists routinely unearth hoards of silver coins (and occasionally gold ones) almost all of which were apparently buried by commoners. Wealthy commoners, to be sure, but still commoners. If a wealthy farmer in a rural district has a hoard of 600 silver coins, you can be pretty certain that coins were circulating in his local area. In addition, we have plenty of medieval accounts (from about the 14th century onwards) which indicate that even small to medium-sized businesses such as ale-sellers were using cash regularly.

 

By the 15th century, in Europe, Banks were big business, with the largest banks being international, with a network of offices across Europe (and in a few cases, outside Europe). You could for example deposit coins in a bank in Rome, get a letter of credit, and for a small fee, withdraw coins from a branch of the bank in Estonia. A "branch of the bank" of course was not like a modern bank: it would normally be one person or a family who had made an arrangement to carry transactions. But it was big business - I recently visited a medieval branch of the Medici bank in Bruges, which for 300 years was a major corporation.

 

Outside Europe, there was a similar - though smaller and less sophisticated - network of banks across the Middle East, which actually had branches as far afield as India. In China, banks and coinage operated in a similar way.

 

So if you want a "realistic" system for money that reflects medieval Europe (let's say western Europe 1300-1500, with big stone castles, knights in plate armour, etc) there are a couple of things you can do.

 

1. Forget the D&D copper/silver/gold coinage system. Almost all European currencies used silver and gold pretty much exclusively. (Yes, I know copper and bronze coins existed: so did iron and bone ones - but we're not talking edge cases here). Coins came in various sizes and values, and the values changed over time depending on size/weight/purity and economic questions: Silver coins lost value, for example when silver started flooding into the market with the Hapsburgs.

 

For example in 14th century England was coinage was 320 farthings (small silver coin) = 80 pennies (slightly larger silver coin) = 20 groats (large silver coin) = 1 noble (gold coin). You can see that each step up in silver is 1:4 and then a step up of 20:1 gold to silver. To complicate things, there were also 1/2 nobles, 1/4 nobles and 1/2 groats and 1/2 pennies, so it was pretty easy to make change.

 

Across the channel, in France you had  240 deniers = 20 sous = 1 Livre Tournais, so a 1:12 ratio between large and little silver coins, but again a 1:20 ratio of silver to gold. In France it is a bit more complicated in that you had two sets of the same coins (minted in Tournais and Paris) but the ones from Paris were officially only worth 80% of the Tournais ones. So you actually had Parisian derniers and sous as well.

 

But these are the official rates. The real rates varied (for example) from 10 to 25 sous per Livre over the first half of the 14th century. At the same time, prices varied wildly - from year to year, from place to place. And that's even before you take into account bits of silver, jewellery and so on that were also used as currency, plus the fact that foreign currency was also often acceptable (albeit at a discount). There was no such thing as "standard prices" except for those few things fixed by royal monopolies. 

 

The key points to take away from all this minute detail are:

 

1. There are a whole bunch of different coin types (6 different types of silver coin, 3 different types of gold) circulating even in one kingdom. There are plenty of good reasons to work up some currencies for your fantasy game, but none of them have to do with book-keeping. For gaming purposes, it really doesn't matter in 99% of cases. Saying "You find a pot filled with silver coins, worth - in total - 6 nobles" is plenty of detail. Honestly do you really care if the PCs pay their inn tab with a 1/2 noble or 20 pennies and 40 farthings?

 

2. While barter or work in exchange for goods was a common part of any medieval economy, it really only applied to people of fixed abode/staus. Peasants might work for a share of the crop, and the local blacksmith might work for food or goods, but good luck trying to pay for your beer with a chicken in the city. In most cases, adventurers will be part of the money economy, the same way that mercenaries, travelling guildmen and merchants were.

 

So. If you want a "realistic" currency system forget about medieval Europe. Look instead to how things function in countries like - say - Egypt today. Barter exists - is important even, some places - but it doesn't usually apply to travellers. There's the official currency, the unofficial currency rate and the fact that you can buy things in foreign currency. Don't have any Egyptian pounds? Ask for a price in dollars or euros. You might pay a fraction more, but it's usually not a problem. Prices are negotiable, often even when a fixed price is displayed.

 

That's how things used to be most places.

 

cheers, Mark

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A significant factor to remember is that, although most coins were gold or silver, most money (or at least most of an economy) was not in coins. I lord's wealth was not just in the coins in their coffers, but in their land, the crops the land produced, and the serfs to till that land (and the training of the serfs, and the fact that the local dragon hasn't burned down the trees in the orchards),.. and on and on.

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Be ready to do a lot of transactions in barter.

 

Also be ready to do a lot of math.

 

Barter yes, but for the sake of gameplay I'd avoid any overly complex denominations. Twelve or twenty coppers to the silver gets you off the decimal system but is still relatively easily to compute.

 

More interesting (to me) is the source and form of the money. Do you want to use Persian gold in a Spartan marketplace? What happens when the usurper confiscates all coins stamped with his predecessor's likeness? Is it going to raise eyebrows when you try to spend coins struck a thousand years ago? Do the coins have holes, so they can be strung together? Or are they precut so that pieces can be broken off?

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The important thing is what the money represents rather than what it is composed of. Money is money because most people agree it is. Barter is not just goods or protection; you could say the tenant farmer was renting the Lord's land for his use but using labor and goods rather than money. It would be like me paying the rent on an apartment by going to the landlord;s house three times a week to cook the family a meal or fix their lawn tractor -- or whatever needed doing at the time.

 

Labor is perhaps the most valuable commodity there is, skilled labor more so. And the medieval peasant has numerous useful skills.

 

Every so often lords would have to muster larger armies than could be fielded using only professional soldiers, so part of a farmer's feudal obligation might be to serve in a peasant levy in time of emergency. The lord would have to be careful, as he still needs laborers for his farmland. These peasant soldiers would get coin in pay, but not as much as the professionals. They also would receive training that is barely adequate to the task, especially if the lord himself is a bad soldier. Many a PC would get his start in one of these peasant levies, possibly by deserting from one.

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Barter yes, but for the sake of gameplay I'd avoid any overly complex denominations. Twelve or twenty coppers to the silver gets you off the decimal system but is still relatively easily to compute.

 

More interesting (to me) is the source and form of the money. Do you want to use Persian gold in a Spartan marketplace? What happens when the usurper confiscates all coins stamped with his predecessor's likeness? Is it going to raise eyebrows when you try to spend coins struck a thousand years ago? Do the coins have holes, so they can be strung together? Or are they precut so that pieces can be broken off?

 

Yeah. This sort of thing is why I worked up coinage for my own games, more than the economics of it (see here for the earlier post on this very topic).

 

cheers, Mark

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  • 4 weeks later...

Late to the party on the topic.... My take on coinage is to remember its all about weight of metal having value.  The rest is just using names of coins from the past to give a good look and feel.

If your game keeps track of encumbrance, this value to weight thing is, IMO, the pivot point of the coinage system.

 

Like I made a silver penny in my game mass at 2g, making a coin about 15mmx1mm, about dime sized.  (edit: this also has the side effect of setting the 'pound' of weight in game to be 480g, not too far off from reality). In a pile of silver coins you assume a mixture of pence, groats, sixpence, testoons or whatever... but if the piles value is X pence, it weighs, 2X grams.  The coin names are flavor.  Players can choose to keep track of coins, or to just keep track of how much pence value of silver they have in their sack.  To maintain immersion, you include the terms in the dialogue.  "It'll be a groat for your lodging, sires."  "Four Pence!  I could buy this hovel for that!"

 

I also include gold coins as well.  Gold being denser, even small coins are worth a lot.  So I set a Crown of 60 pence to weigh 5 grams, and is about 20mm dia x 1mm thick in size.  Essentially this makes 1g gold worth 24g silver. The gold to silver ratio is an arbitrary decision the GM should make.  I chose numbers for ease of division (and am considering a 1:12 ratio to devalue the gold and make the coins larger). In a real economy these will vary.  Dual-metal systems are not stable, but it was the common practice.  

 

TLDR, its really about the weight:value ratio.  The names of the coins are flavor, and good to have.

 

Comments and suggestions welcome.

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What i have done is my campaign is base everything on the concept of what it would cost vs. a common labor's daily wage.  Translated into the modern world think of common labor as a minimum wage worker.

 

Then I ask questions like, how much would the following items cost in terms of 'days of labor for a common laborer':

  • Horse?
  • Dagger?
  • A gem?
  • Tapestry?
  • Furniture?
  • Books?
  • Food?
  • Livestock?
  • Food from a vendor on the street vs. tavern/inn

Some of this can be derived from the modern world.

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Late to the party on the topic.... My take on coinage is to remember its all about weight of metal having value.  The rest is just using names of coins from the past to give a good look and feel.

If your game keeps track of encumbrance, this value to weight thing is, IMO, the pivot point of the coinage system.

 

Like I made a silver penny in my game mass at 2g, making a coin about 15mmx1mm, about dime sized.  (edit: this also has the side effect of setting the 'pound' of weight in game to be 480g, not too far off from reality). In a pile of silver coins you assume a mixture of pence, groats, sixpence, testoons or whatever... but if the piles value is X pence, it weighs, 2X grams.  The coin names are flavor.  Players can choose to keep track of coins, or to just keep track of how much pence value of silver they have in their sack.  To maintain immersion, you include the terms in the dialogue.  "It'll be a groat for your lodging, sires."  "Four Pence!  I could buy this hovel for that!"

 

I also include gold coins as well.  Gold being denser, even small coins are worth a lot.  So I set a Crown of 60 pence to weigh 5 grams, and is about 20mm dia x 1mm thick in size.  Essentially this makes 1g gold worth 24g silver. The gold to silver ratio is an arbitrary decision the GM should make.  I chose numbers for ease of division (and am considering a 1:12 ratio to devalue the gold and make the coins larger). In a real economy these will vary.  Dual-metal systems are not stable, but it was the common practice.  

 

TLDR, its really about the weight:value ratio.  The names of the coins are flavor, and good to have.

 

Comments and suggestions welcome.

 

This is not the case. It absolutely does matter what kind of coin it is. There is even such a thing as exchange rates between the bullion coins of different jurisdictions.   

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This is not the case.

Because..?

It absolutely does matter what kind of coin it is.

Again, because..? Feedback is more valuable for discussion with some substance to support a point.

There is even such a thing as exchange rates between the bullion coins of different jurisdictions.

True, in renaissance Europe or in republican and early imperial Rome and likely a large number of other cultures and times. Once the perceived value of coinage began to be skewed by the power, wealth, or credit rating of the issuer, then the coinage itself becomes a tradeable commodity, rather than merely the metal therein contained. If one's fantasy game is set thus, then, shirley, you can begin to be more arbitrary in value assignment. It is fantasy after all, you could have strips of printed cloth that retain value simply because the sovereign backs it, and has the credit rating to back it up.

 

For metal coinage, the crux is still weight and value; and the ratio between the two. Those are the pragmatic aspects that are necessary for the player. In my game I started with the Carolingian model, then chose numbers to make the math easy within pragmatic reasonability. YMMV

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I started writing a longer post in response, but it got all badfun. It veers into modern politics, after all. There are people who really do believe that the value of money is "intrinsic" to its weight in "precious metal," and not only are they wrong, which is a pretty trivial concern even today but it tends towards delegitimising taxation, which is important.

 

I guess that was kind of a spoiler. Taxation is the source of the value of money, and coining tells you, right away, of the existence of a state. And once its coins are in your pocket, it is interested in you. 

 

You can see where the badfun comes in. "Congratulations, players, you have seized the dragon's hoard of coins, which are the instantion of the power of the emergent state!" Wrong or right as a question of political theory, players tend to prefer a more libertarian setting. 

 

This being said, if you want to go the realistic approach, a coin should trade at an increasing premium the closer it is to its issuing authority --providing that issuing authority acts in good faitn and accepts it as payment in taxation and as legal tender in regulated markets. If you want to go the fantasy approach, the Dark Lord's "red gold" coins can corrupt everyone they touch. Their presence in a merchants pouch or a dragon's hoard is a sign of sinister forces at work. 

 

Here, quite arbitrarily, is a discussion by the one and only John Locke, of the situation prevailing in Britain just before the recoinage of 1693. If your head is swimming at the end with talk of the "value of money," and the cost of bullion in coins, and the exchange of gold and silver, and the relationship of interest rates to "the uncertain and doubtful clipped coinage," then this old-timey economist will have done his work. 

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You're right of course - the idea of intrinsic value as a driver of currency value is ludicrous (and a quick glance at history confirms this). Many people take for granted that gold has intrinsic value and that it's more valuable than silver, but in 15th-17th century Japan, gold was trading at a half to a third the value of silver by weight (at great profit to European traders!) and you can find other similar situations. People used to think that aluminium and cowrie shells had great intrinsic value at one point, too.

 

At the same time, you can't entirely ignore the value of metal - the English had to reduce the weight of their silver coins because the face value of the coin was worth less than the value of the silver in France - so literally tons of coinage was vanishing across the channel to be melted down and turned into cups, jewelry and counterfeit French coinage. This example makes the point both ways - the new coins had far less silver than the old ones - but were worth the same for transactions. So it's not the silver in the coin that makes it valuable - it's the ability to use it for transactions. At the same time silver does have an intrinsic value - said value being its use in non-currency products.

 

But I think you missed the poster's actual point which is that it doesn't actually matter for most gaming purposes: what matters to players is what you can buy with your coins and how much coinage you can carry. The idea is that the same mass of silver coinage has the same value, regardless of which coins it made up of. It's an interesting - even ingenious - idea, though it doesn't match with any historical coinage system that I know of. But then, this is not a historical game. 

 

As for the taxation thing, that's actually pretty simple, State-backed currency has value simply because it is backed up by the ability of the state to levy taxes. The US dollar is stable because it's backed up by the purchasing power of about 240 million taxpayers who mostly pay in full and on time. If the Greeks crash out of the Euro and go back to the Drachma, it'll swiftly lose (relative) value, because it's backed up by a smaller number of taxpayers who pay unwillingly, if at all. In this regard, the value of a currency is no different form the value of a company stock - both rely on cashflow and expected (future) performance. It's got little or nothing to do with geographic proximity - US dollars are legal tender in the US - but also in Zimbabwe. In the preindustrial era, Austrian Thalers were accepted as legal tender in a swathe of countries from Senegal to India. Again, geographical reach had nothing to do with it. It was just that in both cases,the currency was perceived as having a stable - and therefore tradeable - value and also (important) it was available in sufficient quantities to make it practically tradeable.

 

cheers, Mark

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Yeah, I shouldn't have snapped at poor Cosmosemeritus. It's getting politics in the FRP, and who needs that? I'm really reacting to the blithe assertions of your average (bad) SF/Fantasy author who blithely repeats goldbug truisms. And to put it in perspective, I'm thinking of Leo Frankowski, and with apologies to any fans of his who might be out there, that's just not a fair comparison.

 

The distance premium reflects the (fairly substantial) cost of moving bullion coin. A British shilling in Antwerp (after the recoinage, or long before) has two values: there's nothing stopping you from taking it to the silversmieth to be melted down; but the British government pays a premium on the bullion price specifically to prevent this. So if you move it back across the Channel, you can buy more bullion than its face value, less the cost of moving it. At least, if the prices of bullion are comparable in Amsterdam and London! This is a pretty important issue when Britain is maintaining an army on the continent, which means translating British tax receipts into some kind of financial instrument which you can use to pay for forage on the Continent. (British coins won't do, for reasons discussed below. But what about notes drawn on British lenders, payable in British coin? These will have to be bought by people spending currency-of-Antwerp, looking to buy things in London. This creates an "exchange" rate in Amsterdam between thaler and pound, which, in turn, determines the relative price of bullion in the two cities, and so determines the profit you can make --if any-- buying bullion in one city and selling it on the next. Oy!)

 

Now, around the time of the recoinage, the crisis is that all British coins in circulation are old and heavily "clipped," that is, reduced in weight, either by wear or deliberate mutilation. And by "all," I mean that good coins are being hoarded, while bad coins are kept in circulation. As coins keep circulating, they keep wearing down, so that owners of good, newer or long-hoarded coins pracitcally have to cilip them so as not to take a loss. Moreover, if the British government wants to buy them back by issuing coins of the old pattern, people will just hoard (or clip, or even export) them. The solution, as you say, was recoinage at a penalty.

 

At the other extreme, it appears that the Roman Empire did it the other way around. Bring it gold, and it would give you more than its weight in coins. This was possible because i) The Roman Empire had a monopoly on bullion mines; and ii) the political structure of the Roman Empire was based on the Emperor bribing rich people (don't let's have any illusions about the social status of Roman soldiers, by the way) with other rich people's money. It didn't work out terribly well in practice, and we've been trying to work out the monetary-fiscal implications for a long time. For the record, it seems likely to me that the western Roman Empire was gradually demonetarised from the centre; that Britain, for example, left the Roman Empire and the Roman economy for lack of Roman coin --which is why we find clipped Roman coins in late Roman Britain, and nowhere else.

 

(So there's two scenarios from Britain bookending the "medieval era" in which we like to FRP. With knights, no guns, all okay.)  

 

Again, and I can't stress this enough, this kind of detail has no place in fantasy roleplaying. Unless you decide to create a scenario where the dragon's hoard is somehow related to the fate of kingdoms via the international currency exchanges. Which you could do. It might actually be kind of interesting --dragon hoards play heavily to the Medieval fear that rich people were burying all their money, so that no-one would have anything to spend. (As Lord Keynes said, much later, a situation where there are not enough houses for everyone to live in, but at the same time the houses that do exist are too expensive for anyone to buy.)

 

And it would make a change from orcs attacking inns.  

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