device, as will be seen in the case of our own country. It proved ineffectual to prevent the outflow of the metals, and when re-enacted in 1413 was found to be of as little avail. The Cortes of 1442 (Valladolid) complained bitterly, in a petition, of the money drawn away from the realm by foreign merchants, and in the same year a fresh ordinance was issued to readjust the values of the native monies to the foreign coins. In this schedule, doblas de la Banda Page 25 were rated at 100 maravedis, and the florin d'oro d'Aragon at 65 maravedis. In 1473, only thirty or so years later, by the charter of Henry IV., issued at Segovia, these coins were rated at 300 and 200 maravedis respectively. It was only with the advent of the Catholic sovereigns that the internal disorder and want of unity of the Spanish system was effectually remedied, in the very hour of that discovery of a new world which was to put upon Spain the vital function of distributing the new stores of precious metals (see account of Spanish monies, Appendix III.).
Germany.
The movements of the precious metals in Germany—which, as far as the ratio of the two metals is concerned, may be held to include the Netherlands up to 1552, when Flanders withdrew from the monetary system of the Holy Roman Empire—is a record of exactly the same process of natural and gradual appreciation of the metal (i.e. depreciation of the weight and fineness of the coin) as in Spain, France, and England. In the accompanying tables the movement of silver is illustrated by means of the groschen, and that of gold by the Rhenish gulden. These coins, it need hardly be said, were not unit coins, nor sole prevailing. They are chosen from the bewildering variety with which the numerous independent Mints of Germany have succeeded in perplexing posterity, as being of relatively greater repute and wider acceptance, and Page 26 because it is a simply impossible task to combine all the denominations of these coins, in order to deduce an average.