to act upon its own proclamations. Eighteen merchants were sentenced in the Star Chamber for exporting gold (8th December 1619), five being acquitted. The total of the fines imposed on the sentenced men reached £140,000, and it was stated that since the beginning of the reign a matter of £7,000,000 of gold had been surreptitiously exported. On the 31st July 1619 proclamation was issued for a new coinage. The gold angel was reduced in weight from 71 1⁄9 grs. to 64 11⁄15, being equivalent to an increase of an eleventh in its denominational value: and in January 1620, following the convictions of the merchants referred to, the Council busily debated "the erecting an exchange for monies, to prevent the export of silver by the goldsmiths who have been the offenders."
All these steps were taken too late, and the currency crisis which shook Germany ran its full course, too, in England.
In 1620 there was a great scarcity of silver in the country, and the trade of the Eastland merchant was gone—a scarcity and decay which they attributed "to the rise of foreign coin, especially that of Poland and Holland, during the last four years in which the Hollanders have farmed the King of Poland's Mint." The export of cloth had sunk to one-third the output Page 140 of the previous year. By May 1621 the situation had become pressing. The secret export of