Speaker 1: This is an I heart original in William Chaloner, now
Speaker 1: the best counterfeiter in London, living in a fine house
Speaker 1: in suburban Knightsbridge, wearing the clothes of a gentleman, inserted
Speaker 1: himself into the debate around the coins. This was less
Speaker 1: than two years before Parliament passed three Coinage Act and
Speaker 1: Challenger's name appeared on a pamphlet entitled Proposals Humbly offered
Speaker 1: for an Act to prevent clipping and counterfeiting money. Everybody's
Speaker 1: always so humble mm hmm. Now England hath been more
Speaker 1: grieved with clipped and counterfeit money than any other country,
Speaker 1: for want of proper laws to prevent the same, and
Speaker 1: by the abuse of the mintors of our money, who
Speaker 1: have made the coin with so little art and ingenuity,
Speaker 1: that any may clip or counterfeit money without much difficulty,
Speaker 1: that it may be presumed the old money in this
Speaker 1: kingdom is now worth two thirds of the intrinsic value.
Speaker 1: But if there be not a stop put to clipping
Speaker 1: of money, it will in a few years be so
Speaker 1: diminished and counterfeited that it will not be worth half
Speaker 1: the value it was coined for. Challoner was some forty
Speaker 1: years later sounding a lot like Monsieur Blonde, And of
Speaker 1: course he wasn't wrong about the coins, because not much
Speaker 1: had changed since the sixteen fifties, despite the introduction of
Speaker 1: the machines. Remember, the Treasury never recalled all the old coins. Now,
Speaker 1: we know that Challoner was more qualified and most to
Speaker 1: talk about clipping and counterfeiting, But why would he start
Speaker 1: offering tips on how to put himself out of business?
Speaker 1: Was chunder going legit using his ill gotten knowledge for
Speaker 1: the betterment of the kingdom. Not quite. This was something
Speaker 1: bigger than making fake coins and sneakier. Now, the money
Speaker 1: being such bad workmanship every smith, clockmaker, brazier, goldsmith, et cetera,
Speaker 1: and grave stamps, and the work being so flat and
Speaker 1: irregular they can stamp money with a hammer of three
Speaker 1: pound weight, which is a great grievance to the Kingdom
Speaker 1: to have our money coins so disingenuously that it may
Speaker 1: be counterfeited with so much ease. This was a good suggestion,
Speaker 1: so good that the Mint was pretty much already in
Speaker 1: possession of such a machine. However, Chaloner also added, like
Speaker 1: everyone else, that the Treasury needed to recall all the
Speaker 1: old coins, melt them down and re mint them. Chaloner
Speaker 1: also made a few other suggestions, some practical and some
Speaker 1: us so. For example, he proposed that the Mint go
Speaker 1: on the road, travel from county to county, to allow
Speaker 1: the rich and the poor like to trade in their
Speaker 1: coins without fear of being robbed or missing out. Parliament
Speaker 1: was not going to go for any of it, really,
Speaker 1: after all, who was this William Chaloner anyway is the
Speaker 1: son of a Warwickshire weaver. But Chaloner didn't care whether
Speaker 1: his suggestions were actually adopted. What Chaloner wanted was to
Speaker 1: be noticed. It was just possible, or just becoming possible,
Speaker 1: for smart people with things to say to get attention
Speaker 1: from powerful people through the new medium of the press.
Speaker 1: Have you read the ideas of this chileon? Yes, I
Speaker 1: am immensely interested in his proposals. Maybe we should put
Speaker 1: them to the test. I would be going to speak
Speaker 1: doing further on the subject. A moveablement would be too
Speaker 1: great a charge to the King and treasure. But we
Speaker 1: must do something about the counterfeits. Indeed, Mrs William Chaloner
Speaker 1: speaks since and there's schools at the mint. Having the
Speaker 1: merest idea of how they curved the clippup and coins
Speaker 1: will sink us All Challenger and figured out that he
Speaker 1: could use pamphlets as a way to manufacture himself a
Speaker 1: reputation as an expert, to make a name for himself
Speaker 1: not only among the criminal classes, and this he thought
Speaker 1: could get him what he really wanted and in at
Speaker 1: the Mint, a way to waltz through the front door
Speaker 1: and get a close up look at its operations. Challoner
Speaker 1: summed up his proposal by offering to show Parliament some
Speaker 1: exemplary pieces of coin my own design, to demonstrate how
Speaker 1: money can be coined so that it shall be impossible
Speaker 1: wolf for any private person to counterfeit it. And he
Speaker 1: offered to do it at the Mint for I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: I'm Linda Rodriguez mccrabbie and this is Newton's Law and
Speaker 1: I Heart original podcast Episode three. Mint Condition you are
Speaker 1: making Act one. They're not so great re Coinage. William
Speaker 1: Challoner's proposals didn't get him into the Mint yet, but
Speaker 1: his recommendation to recall and recoin, now that was something
Speaker 1: everyone knew had to be done, and by late Parliament
Speaker 1: knew it too. The Great Recoinage, as it was later called,
Speaker 1: started on January and it was meant to be wrapped
Speaker 1: up in a few months. Most of the time, the
Speaker 1: mints were seasonal. If that the men who worked at
Speaker 1: them tended to be farm laborers who were called up
Speaker 1: for duty when the mint decided it needed new coins. This, however,
Speaker 1: was an all hands on deck situation in order to
Speaker 1: meet the demands of the incredibly ambitious, certainly foolish schedule
Speaker 1: imposed by Parliament. Work at the mint started at four
Speaker 1: am and didn't stop until midnight every day except Sunday.
Speaker 1: But if you're a picture during a tidy assembly line
Speaker 1: style operation, don't Yes, it's not a modern manufacturing process
Speaker 1: as we understand it today, so don't think of a um,
Speaker 1: you know, production line process where you might start at
Speaker 1: one end of the mint and neatly work your way around.
Speaker 1: That's Chris Barker, historian at the modern Royal Mint. It's
Speaker 1: a very hiddle dey piddled arrangement. So you may well
Speaker 1: have melting at one end and then you move your
Speaker 1: casted strip down to another end of the mint, so
Speaker 1: it's a little bit here, there and everywhere. And this
Speaker 1: was on machines that were now more than thirty years old,
Speaker 1: in a workshop that had been in use since the
Speaker 1: thirteenth century, and all of that manufacturing took place in
Speaker 1: the town. So if you can imagine the situation you
Speaker 1: would you would have if you were a visit to, say,
Speaker 1: walking into the raw Mint in the Tower of London,
Speaker 1: you'd walk into a very narrow, cramped, confined alley way
Speaker 1: which is flanked on either side by wooden buildings, many
Speaker 1: even sort of crazed with age, often falling to pieces,
Speaker 1: and you've got to count them literally propped up with
Speaker 1: timber and sort of bolted together with big eye bolts
Speaker 1: and fall into parts. It's very ramshackle institution. Um by
Speaker 1: this point in history, nearly three d workmen, nine presses,
Speaker 1: and ten million machines, as well as the three large
Speaker 1: furnaces were crammed into this ramshackle institution, which was not
Speaker 1: more than a hundred feet at its widest, and that's
Speaker 1: not even counting the horses. Some of the rolling machines,
Speaker 1: which flattened the sheets of metal to the right thickness
Speaker 1: to be punched into blanks, relied on horsepower to turn
Speaker 1: their incredible weight. There could be as many as twelve
Speaker 1: horses in the workshop at any given moment. Over the
Speaker 1: roughly two years of the recoinage, the Mint spent nearly
Speaker 1: seven hundred pounds as an actual money in hauling manure
Speaker 1: away that's a hundred and thirty five thousand pounds in
Speaker 1: today's money. That was at the Tower Mint, the maintment
Speaker 1: in the country. But to facilitate bringing in old coins
Speaker 1: in places far from London and to up production on
Speaker 1: making new ones, the Mint had established temporary operations in Bristol, Chester, Exeter,
Speaker 1: Norwich and York, but none of it the long days.
Speaker 1: The horse manure of the temporary mints was enough. Things
Speaker 1: were not going well at all to begin with. The
Speaker 1: man in charge of the recoinage was a guy called
Speaker 1: Thomas Neil. He was known as Golden Neil after his
Speaker 1: extremely advantageous match to England's richest widow, a woman with
Speaker 1: an estate valued at a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
Speaker 1: Neil was the Master of the Mint, one of the
Speaker 1: three officers along with the warden and the Controller who
Speaker 1: ran the Mint. But he was meant to be the
Speaker 1: one making this huge undertaking happen, and Neil was, in
Speaker 1: a word, useless. It's a recoinage is not doing well
Speaker 1: at all. It must be somebody else's fault. Neil was
Speaker 1: one of those rich guys who just kept failing upwards
Speaker 1: with the help of his powerful contacts. He was the
Speaker 1: groom of the bed chamber for Charles the Second, James
Speaker 1: the Second, and William the Third, a role that basically
Speaker 1: meant that he helped the king, whichever one it was,
Speaker 1: get dressed and referee as card games. He'd been Master
Speaker 1: of the Mint since six eighties six, but he was
Speaker 1: a terrible administrator who had done very little to plan
Speaker 1: for the recoinage. Neil was not a good Master of
Speaker 1: the Mint. I mean he was not involved in in
Speaker 1: then any you know, in a day to day basis.
Speaker 1: He's the man who ran up ginormous debts and was
Speaker 1: not really concerned generally from from the Mint point of view.
Speaker 1: So it was his assistant, the Deputy Master, a French
Speaker 1: Hugueno called Dr John Francis Faquier, who did the business
Speaker 1: and stuff while Neil did other things. Ran the North
Speaker 1: American Postal Service, or rather had a deputy who actually
Speaker 1: lived in the colonies do it. Speculated on housing developments
Speaker 1: Neil Street. That has a nice ring to it. Trying
Speaker 1: to invent cheap proof dice, raised shipwrecks, stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Who the fun I leave it to you? You consorted right.
Speaker 1: Facua did his best, But there weren't enough men, and
Speaker 1: the machines were all old, and there weren't enough of
Speaker 1: them either. The mints were not producing coin quickly enough
Speaker 1: to meet demand, and the country was in actual danger
Speaker 1: of running out of legal physical money. This problem was
Speaker 1: compounded by the fact that the mechanism of the government
Speaker 1: put in place for allowing people to trade in their
Speaker 1: old coins for new ones was not so good. They say,
Speaker 1: for a given period of time, we will take coins
Speaker 1: at their face value, regardless of how badly worn or
Speaker 1: degreat they are. So if you present something that you
Speaker 1: can see is a shilling but has lost half its weight,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, batted and barely legible, the official
Speaker 1: will still take it a shillings value, even though there's
Speaker 1: only half a shilling's worth of silver there. But this
Speaker 1: system was somewhat narrow. Only people who paid direct taxes
Speaker 1: or made loans to the government were allowed to trade
Speaker 1: cliped or debased money in for face value. The trade
Speaker 1: in also only lasted five months, and that means that
Speaker 1: those are in the know, those in the urban areas
Speaker 1: who can really get onto this can make a huge
Speaker 1: profit because you can gather a selection of very battered
Speaker 1: coins which only have minimal silver value, tender them in
Speaker 1: and actually get the full face value for them. The
Speaker 1: people that suffer are those in the isolated areas, those
Speaker 1: who are more remote and more rural, who cannot get
Speaker 1: all this old coinage that they might have available to
Speaker 1: the exchange in time in order to benefit from this,
Speaker 1: because after a certain time you don't get that full
Speaker 1: face value. Instead you just left with the weight of
Speaker 1: the coinage. Within six months people had to sell their
Speaker 1: old coins at weight, meaning that their coins had suddenly
Speaker 1: lost as much as half of their value. By this time,
Speaker 1: there wasn't enough re legal coin in circulation to pay
Speaker 1: for the expenses of daily life. Here's writer John Evelyn's
Speaker 1: diary entry from May. Money still continuing exceeding scarce, so
Speaker 1: the done was paid or received, but all was on trust,
Speaker 1: the mint not supplying for common necessities. Things were still
Speaker 1: bad a month later. Want of current money to carry
Speaker 1: on the smallest concerns even for daily provisions in the
Speaker 1: markets guineas lowered to twenty two shillings and great sums
Speaker 1: daily transported to Holland, where at yields more with other
Speaker 1: treasures sent to pay the armies. And so imprudent was
Speaker 1: the late Parliament to condemn the old though clipped and
Speaker 1: corrupted till they had provided supplies to this at the
Speaker 1: fraud of the bankers and goldsmiths, who, having gotten immense
Speaker 1: riches by extortion, keep up their treasure in expectation of
Speaker 1: enhancing its value. The mint, Underneil's very hands off leadership,
Speaker 1: was floundering. Nothing considerable coined of the new and now
Speaker 1: only current stamp. Of course, such a scarcity that tumults
Speaker 1: every day feed that there wasn't enough coin was bad
Speaker 1: for wealthier people like John Evelyn, but again it was
Speaker 1: much worse for the poor. Another contemporary observer wrote in
Speaker 1: a private letter that the people are discontented to the utmost,
Speaker 1: adding that many self murders were happening owing to the want,
Speaker 1: and it was starting to look pretty bleak for the
Speaker 1: government as well. For one thing, the want that drove
Speaker 1: people to kill themselves might just as easily drive them
Speaker 1: to rage and riot. These were and are the conditions
Speaker 1: that lead to revolution, and in fact, at least one
Speaker 1: town saw people arrested for rioting after attack. Collector refused
Speaker 1: to take the old coins, but what else were they
Speaker 1: going to pay with? And that's the other thing. When
Speaker 1: the people can't pay rent or taxes, the government's coffers
Speaker 1: start to empty. This government was already in trouble, so
Speaker 1: the sudden lack of revenue made things that much worse.
Speaker 1: Soldiers in some parts of the country were being paid
Speaker 1: in provisions because there wasn't enough coin to pay them
Speaker 1: in real money. Mutinous grumblings added to the tumult, and
Speaker 1: everyone started squinting at the King and Queen suspiciously. If
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton had wanted an easy gig, he had become
Speaker 1: Warden of the Royal Mint at exactly the wrong time
Speaker 1: Act two. Out with the Old in with the Newton.
Speaker 1: To put it diccinctly, the Mint was a shambles, a
Speaker 1: mess that was threatening to undermine the economy, the new monarchy,
Speaker 1: the country's fragile financial institutions, everything. And when he was
Speaker 1: confronted with this mess, Warden Isaac Newton didn't do what
Speaker 1: Master Neil had done, and he didn't do what every
Speaker 1: other warden had done, which was basically nothing. A Newson
Speaker 1: could have done that. But Newson was not that sort
Speaker 1: of puss. That's Dr Patricia Farah, Cambridge historian and Newton expert.
Speaker 1: He went in the very energetically and decided he was
Speaker 1: going to overhaul the system and make it work properly.
Speaker 1: And he was a very very dedicated, systematic, organized manager.
Speaker 1: Newton rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He was,
Speaker 1: as one biographer later said, a born administrator. Thomas Fowl,
Speaker 1: a clerk at the Mint, actually wrote to Newton to
Speaker 1: tell him that he was the first wordens since at
Speaker 1: least sixteen seventy two who didn't treat the post as
Speaker 1: a signic cure. If I may be so bold to say,
Speaker 1: we shall find you fair to exceed the rest for
Speaker 1: the gooden privileges of the Mint, more than all your predecessors.
Speaker 1: Foul also spent the majority of this letter explaining all
Speaker 1: the ways that the previous wardens had disappointed. Sir Anthonys
Speaker 1: and Ledger, then warden of the Mint, came very seldom
Speaker 1: to the place, and did not anything of service more
Speaker 1: than to come and ask how the affairs of the
Speaker 1: Mint were, And that was all, and so went his
Speaker 1: way foul might have been trying to get on Newton's
Speaker 1: good side, certainly, but Charles Montague, the Chancellor of the
Speaker 1: Exchequer who gave Newton the job, later said that the
Speaker 1: recoinage couldn't have happened without him. Nietzsan was absolutely meticulous
Speaker 1: in everything that he did. He was a very thorough man.
Speaker 1: It seems that all the energy he put into making
Speaker 1: observations of the stars or holding the dates of ancient
Speaker 1: events that happened thousands of years ago, he turned all
Speaker 1: that energy into making sure that the mint was rung
Speaker 1: as efficiently as the microscope had only really just been invented,
Speaker 1: but Newton was putting the mints operations under it. Metaphorically speaking.
Speaker 1: Newton researched the history of the mint going back two
Speaker 1: hundred years. He went through decades of accounting books, making
Speaker 1: notes in the margins. He was an obsessive copier. He
Speaker 1: could have had his assistance copied down all the meeting notes,
Speaker 1: all his letters and correspondence with the Treasury and others,
Speaker 1: but he did it himself. Haines, bring the records. I
Speaker 1: want all the receipts and accounting books and the warrants.
Speaker 1: This meant that Newton was aware of all the mints business,
Speaker 1: so much so that he knew who was trying to
Speaker 1: get one over on the Mint, as the Treasury already
Speaker 1: paid the cop For example, he told the Treasury not
Speaker 1: to pay the carpenters until the quality of their work
Speaker 1: was checked. We are humbly off opinion that the work
Speaker 1: done by the carpenter and the rest of the workman
Speaker 1: ought to be surveyed and valued before their whole bills
Speaker 1: are paid off. Another time, he kept the Mint from
Speaker 1: signing a contract with some metal dealers who had offered
Speaker 1: to take over the recoinage at a very steep markup.
Speaker 1: These goldsmiths want how much preposterous? From my observations, the
Speaker 1: Mint can do for at least a third less than
Speaker 1: these Charlatan's propose. Golden Neil has made a mess of
Speaker 1: this mood that he was spending his wife's money and
Speaker 1: not the Treasury. Is within a month and a half
Speaker 1: on the job, Newton had shouldered useless Neil out of
Speaker 1: the way and was basically doing his job too. We
Speaker 1: are in the business of making money, not spending it needlessly.
Speaker 1: Newton knew that in order for the Mint to meet
Speaker 1: the demands of the Treasury. Some things, a lot of
Speaker 1: things had to change. If you can keep reason above passion,
Speaker 1: that and watchfulness will be your best defendants. Newton saw
Speaker 1: that the machines were producing a maximum of fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: pounds of coin a week. The treasury wanted thirty pounds
Speaker 1: of coin a week. This was a mass problem. Newton
Speaker 1: calculated that he'd need two new smelting furnaces, eight new
Speaker 1: rolling mills, and five new coining presses. This sort of
Speaker 1: empirical data collection, this was what Newton was really really
Speaker 1: good at. For example, as Thomas Levinson noted in his
Speaker 1: book Newton in the Counterfeiter, Newton realized that a new
Speaker 1: melting pot could hold eight hundred pounds of silver metal,
Speaker 1: but within six weeks that capacity was reduced to just
Speaker 1: six and fifty pounds because the pot actually got smaller
Speaker 1: as the silver codd it. This effected the output and
Speaker 1: the number of coins that could be produced, so Newton
Speaker 1: determined that a part was only good for about a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty meltings. Newton cast his eye around the
Speaker 1: workshop looking for more inefficiencies. There is also a waste
Speaker 1: in the milling by the dripping off off the sand
Speaker 1: with some particles of silver, and by some blanks falling
Speaker 1: out of the pan upon the half and shreds of
Speaker 1: silver lost in the dust, or by sticking to the
Speaker 1: workman's shoes. Then he turned to the men themselves. One
Speaker 1: of the things that he did was to institute what
Speaker 1: we would call time and motion studies, and he watched
Speaker 1: all the people working, and he insisted that they should
Speaker 1: work far, far faster to make the work more efficient.
Speaker 1: Newton calculated the rate at which mint workers could turn
Speaker 1: out coins. Two mills with four millers, twelve horses, two horsekeepers,
Speaker 1: three cutters, two flatters, eight sizes, one kneeler, three blanches,
Speaker 1: too markers to press his with fourteen laborers to pull
Speaker 1: at them, can coin three thousand pounds up money per diam.
Speaker 1: Newton said, the men operating the press needed to produce
Speaker 1: fifty to fifty five coins a minute in order to
Speaker 1: make three thou pounds of coin a day. That's almost
Speaker 1: a coin every second. That's fast. It is physically demanding.
Speaker 1: And the four gentlemen who are pulling on the on
Speaker 1: the ropes as part of the screw press, and there's
Speaker 1: the demands as such that they can only operate in
Speaker 1: shifts of fifteen minutes before they're exhausted. So they're doing
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes on they'll swap out. Four more people come
Speaker 1: in fifteen minutes, and so they're constantly swapping in and out.
Speaker 1: This does not make Newton popular with his new staff. Unsurprisingly,
Speaker 1: all the staff disliked him because he made the work
Speaker 1: at a far higher rate, since he got rid of
Speaker 1: all the little private practices where people were making money
Speaker 1: on the site. So he was a very very efficient manager.
Speaker 1: He was also a ruthless manage I don't think Newton
Speaker 1: was particularly well liked at all, if I'm honest. I
Speaker 1: mean there are there are accounts of people who get
Speaker 1: on with him. Don't get me wrong, he wasn't. He
Speaker 1: was not disliked by everybody, but there was also a
Speaker 1: lot of people he rubbed up the wrong way. I
Speaker 1: think he's probably one of those individuals where if he
Speaker 1: took a disliking to you, that was it. No matter
Speaker 1: what you did, no matter what you could do, you've
Speaker 1: had it. Newton's efforts and indifference to the opinions of
Speaker 1: his staff paid off. Between sixteen ninety six and seventeen hundred,
Speaker 1: The value of the silver struck by the Mint was
Speaker 1: more than five point one million pounds. That was about
Speaker 1: two million pounds more than had been made in the
Speaker 1: previous thirty five years put together, and more importantly, by
Speaker 1: September sixteen ninety six, silver coin was again flowing through
Speaker 1: the veins of the country's economy. There were no major riots,
Speaker 1: no revolution, and both the King and Queen kept their heads.
Speaker 1: Newton thought he deserved a raise, or at least as
Speaker 1: much as Neil was getting, for being master. The salary
Speaker 1: of the warden of his Majesty's Mint is only four
Speaker 1: pound per annum, with a house where forty pound per annum,
Speaker 1: and his purposes are only three pound twelve shillings per
Speaker 1: annum for call, all which taxes being deducted. Is so
Speaker 1: small in respect of the salaries and purposes of the
Speaker 1: other officers of the Mint, as suffices not to support
Speaker 1: the authority of his office. It seems that Newton got
Speaker 1: that raise, But there was still another problem facing the Mint,
Speaker 1: and this one wasn't something Newton could solve through a
Speaker 1: time and motion study. This was a problem that would,
Speaker 1: at least for a while, consume the majority of Newton's
Speaker 1: time as warden bringing clippers and counterfeiters to justice, and
Speaker 1: it was a part of Newton's job that he was
Speaker 1: not happy about at all. Nor is there any reward
Speaker 1: or encouragement appointing for my service in these matters? Nor
Speaker 1: am I provided with any competent assistance to enable me
Speaker 1: to grapple with an undertaking soul vac sastious and dangerous?
Speaker 1: Is this coming up on Newton's Law? We know by
Speaker 1: now that this most vexatious counterfeiter, William Chaloner, is no
Speaker 1: run of the mill coiner, So how will his play
Speaker 1: for the mint itself turn out? The Mint is either
Speaker 1: incompetent or corrupt or both. Newton's Law is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. It's written and hosted by Me
Speaker 1: Linda Rodriguez McRobie. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Emily Marina. Our executive producer is Jason English.
Speaker 1: Original music by Alice McCoy with editing help from Mary Do,
Speaker 1: Sound design and mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research in fact
Speaker 1: checking by me and Jocelyn Sears. Voice acting by Keith Fleming,
Speaker 1: Mark McDonald and Robert Jack. Special thanks to Chris Barker
Speaker 1: and Dr Patricia Farrell. Special thanks to Mangesh Hatikudur and
Speaker 1: Fineflex Sound Studios. Our show logo is designed by Lucy Continia.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, Bloodio