Till the reign of Charles II our coin had been struck by a process as old as the thirteenth century. The metal was shaped with shears and stamped by the hammer. The inexactitude of such coinage became the opportunity for the clipper of coins. A mill was set up at the Tower of London which was worked by horses and superseded the human hand. The coins were exactly circular, their edges were inscribed with a legend, and clipping was thereby made apparently impossible. But the hammered coins and the milled coins were current together. The result was, as it always is, that the light and poorer coin drove the better one out of the current circulation. The milled crown new from the mint became more valuable for shipment abroad or for use in the crucible. Coiners grew and multiplied because the damaged and defaced coins could be more easily imitated. Hundreds of wretched persons were dragged up Holborn Hill, and in spite of flogging, branding, and hanging, the trade of the coin clipper was easier than highway robbery, and as fortunes were to be made those who followed that avocation took the risks, as did smugglers. It was a dangerous occupation. Seven men were hanged one morning and a woman branded, but this did not deter the hundreds who were undetected. One clipper who was caught offered £6,000 for a pardon, which was rejected, but the news gave a stimulus to the industry. The Government of the day became alarmed at the state of things, which grew from bad to worse. A sum of £57,200 of hammered money paid into the Exchequer was tested by the officials. It should have weighed above 220,000 ounces; it weighed under 114,000 ounces. (_Lowndes’ Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins_, 1695.) A Quaker who came from the North journeyed southwards, and his diary shows that as he travelled towards London the innkeepers were astonished at the full and heavy weight of the half-crowns he offered. They asked where such money could be found. The guinea which he purchased at Lancaster for twenty-two shillings bore a different value at every stage. In London it was worth thirty shillings, and would have been worth more had not the Government fixed this as the highest at which gold should be received in payment of taxes. The _Memoirs_ of this Quaker were published in the _Manchester Guardian_ some thirty years ago. It may readily be imagined that such a state of things began to cripple trade. Merchants stipulated as to the quality of the coin in which they were to be paid. “The labourer found that the bit of metal which, when he received it, was called a shilling, would hardly, when he wanted to purchase a pot of beer or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as sixpence.” Tonson the bookseller sends Dryden forty brass shillings. Another time he paid the poet in silver pieces that were so bad that they could not be passed.