Till the reign of Charles the Second our coin had been struck by a process as old as the thirteenth century.  Edward the First had invited hither skilful artists from Florence, which, in his time, was to London what London, in the time of William the Third, was to Moscow.  During many generations, the instruments which were then introduced into our mint continued to be employed with little alteration.  The metal was divided with shears, and afterwards shaped and stamped by the hammer.  In these operations much was left to the hand and eye of the workman.  It necessarily happened that some pieces contained a little more and some a little less than the just quantity of silver; few pieces were exactly round; and the rims were not marked.  It was therefore in the course of years discovered that to clip the coin was one of the easiest and most profitable kinds of fraud.  In the reign of Elizabeth it had been thought necessary to enact that the clipper should be, as the coiner had long been, liable to the penalties of high treason.629 The practice of paring down money, however, was far too lucrative to be so checked; and, about the time of the Restoration, people began to observe that a large proportion of the crowns, halfcrowns and shillings which were passing from hand to hand had undergone some slight mutilation.

That was a time fruitful of experiments and inventions in all the departments of science.  A great improvement in the mode of shaping and striking the coin was suggested.  A mill, which to a great extent superseded the human hand, was set up in the Tower of London.  This mill was worked by horses, and would doubtless be considered by modern engineers as a rude and feeble machine.  The pieces which it produced, however, were among the best in Europe.  It was not easy to counterfeit them; and, as their shape was exactly circular, and their edges were inscribed with a legend, clipping was not to be apprehended.630 The hammered coins and the milled coins were current together.  They were received without distinction in public, and consequently in private, payments.  The financiers of that age seem to have expected that the new money, which was excellent, would soon displace the old money which was much impaired.  Yet any man of plain understanding might have known that, when the State treats perfect coin and light coin as of equal value, the perfect coin will not drive the light coin out of circulation, but will itself be driven out.  A clipped crown, on English ground, went as far in the payment of a tax or a debt as a milled crown.  But the milled crown, as soon as it had been flung into the crucible or carried across the Channel, became much more valuable than the clipped crown.  It might therefore have been predicted, as confidently as any thing can be predicted which depends on the human will, that the inferior pieces would remain in the only market in which they could fetch the same price as the superior pieces, and that the superior pieces would take some form or fly to some place in which some advantage could be derived from their superiority.631