succeeding century saw a rapid development in the commerce of Northern Europe, and a gold coinage had gradually become both a possibility and a necessity. One after the other—in the order of time just detailed—the various commercial states with which England had intercourse had adopted it and profited by it. That England should follow in the movement scarcely more than sixteen years later than Germany, and a year or two before Flanders, is some evidence of the organisation of her trade, as well as of the intimacy of inter-commercial relationships. So Page 13 purely a matter of trade and natural growth was this vast movement of the adoption of a gold coinage—a revolution indeed as it proved, though yet unwritten, more momentous in its influence on European civilisation than either the Renaissance or the Reformation.
Approximately, therefore, the fourteenth century may be taken as the starting-point for a history of European bimetallism. The first period of that history embraces all the movements of the previous metals, from such starting-point up to the discovery of America in 1492—a matter of two centuries, roughly speaking.
The characteristics of this period are perfectly well defined, and repeat themselves with almost faithful and exact similarity of recurrence in the several states comprising the Europe of that date. In brief, such characteristics were those of—(1) a period of commercial expanse, necessitating an increasing currency and advancing prices; (2) a period of stationary production of the precious metals, necessitating a struggle among the various states for the possession of those metals; (3) a period of endless change in the ratio between gold and silver, necessitating continual revision of the rate of exchange. Broadly speaking, those characteristics fall into two classes, accordingly as they relate to—(1) the natural movement of prices i.e. having regard merely to the supply of the precious metals; (2) to the unnatural struggle for the metals themselves—for the material Page 14 for currency—due to international rivalry and bad or crafty legislation.