“So Pale, So Lame, So Lean, So Ruinous”: The Circulation of Foreign Coins in Early Modern England

Deng, Stephen

doi:10.1002/9781444310986.ch15

Cited by 10 publications

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“…104 Warnings about the influx of counterfeit coins from overseas echoed more general concerns about the circulation of foreign specie in England. 105 As Deng has noted, foreign coins were often represented as alien bodies infiltrating the larger 'body politic' of the nation, causing corruption and decay to the commonwealth. This was especially the case for counterfeit foreign coins, which in any case were not legal tender, but it was also true of 'good' foreign coins which might also be perceived to 'possess a corrupting influence'.…”

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Currency, Conversation, and Control: Political Discourse and the Coinage in Mid-Tudor England

Bishop¹

2016

The English Historical Review

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In 1551, stories began to circulate in England about sightings of a 'strange coin'. The coin, which was said to depict a bear on one face and a ragged staff on the other, was rumoured to have been produced in a secret mint that the Earl of Warwick had established in Dudley Castle. The first recorded instance of this rumour comes from October 1551, when one Anthony Gyller of Coventry was sent to the Marshalsea on the charge that he had 'spoken and bruted abrode sediciously that the Lorde Great Master had set up a coyning house at Dudley Castle, and that he had sene the newe coyne hym sellf, which was, he sayd, a ragged staff on thone side and a beares face on thother'. The day after Gyller's arrest, a Yeoman of the Guard also reported that he had seen 'a certain strange coyne with a ragged staff' on it; he too was arrested and taken into custody. 1 The day after that, two more men were sent to the Marshalsea 'for a brute raysed of the aforenamed straunge coyne'. 2 Although Anthony Gyller was released from prison in 1552, the rumour about the strange coin persisted; and in the same month, one Thomas Holland of Bath also claimed to have seen a shilling with 'a ragged staff in it'. 3 The story of the 'strange coin' was not confined to the claims of these five men. It gained international currency when Jehan Scheyfve, Ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to England, wrote his own account of it in a letter to the Imperial Court. Scheyfve noted that the rumour had arisen after a new coinage had been introduced in England, and that the rumour concerned the new silver shilling, commonly known as a 'teston'. He reported that 'when the new testoons came out a murmur arose among the people that the said testoons bore the three bears staffs … instead of three lions', and explained that 'the blame for this 1

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Currency, Conversation, and Control: Political Discourse and the Coinage in Mid-Tudor England

Bishop¹

2016

The English Historical Review

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Refusing Demography

2021

Reckoning With Slavery

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Beginning with a discussion of the 1662 Virginia law concerning the heritability of enslavement, this introduction, “Refusing Demography,” considers the connections among slavery, race, gender, and commodification in the early modern Atlantic world. Despite the ways in which women are frequently omitted from histories of hereditary racial slavery, they were uniquely situated to understand its logics. As the marketplace of slavery was rooted in their symbolic and material capacity to produce children, these women accounted for the connection between slavery and their own alleged kinlessness. They had a particular relationship to the rhythms of slavery and its ideology—capture, transport, sale, labor, and refusal—that was rooted in their reproductive potential. This introduction argues that a history of women and the transatlantic slave trade reveals the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification.

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Producing Numbers

2021

Reckoning With Slavery

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Questions of demography and demographic data have always been the foundation on which social histories are built. How many women were captured and transported to the Americas in the first two hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade? Chapter 1, “Producing Numbers: Reckoning with the Sex Ratio in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1500–1700,” considers the answer to this deceptively simple question and suggests that the nature of demographic evidence reveals a series of connections across data and ideology that emerge from the early history of the transatlantic slave trade. By focusing on when and where enslaved women were counted, the impact of gender and race on emerging ideologies of population and trade come into focus. The chapter also highlights the ways in which the production of data about slavery and the slave trade reflects racialized categories of knowledge production that contribute to the erasure of enslaved people from the archives.

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“So Pale, So Lame, So Lean, So Ruinous”: The Circulation of Foreign Coins in Early Modern England

Cited by 10 publications

References 3 publications

Currency, Conversation, and Control: Political Discourse and the Coinage in Mid-Tudor England

Currency, Conversation, and Control: Political Discourse and the Coinage in Mid-Tudor England

Refusing Demography

Producing Numbers

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