gold is apparent from the change of the ratio there at her first immediately succeeding return to good money. Two periods of debasement had marked the short reign of John of France (1350-64), and the effect of these and of the influence of the English ratio was such that in 1360 there was no gold in his kingdom. Towards the end of that year, and in the beginning of 1361, John promulgated a reformation of the coinage—a return to good or "forte" money, and in this reformation he adopted a ratio which would act on the English stock of precious metals.
In England, Edward's action in 1353 in lowering the contents of both silver and gold coins, and altering the ratio, had given rise to great discontent, to an extent which proved how wiser and truer to the nation's interest was the King than his people. This diminution of the value of these coins, says the Chronicle, made all things dearer, so that the workmen and servants became assuming and demanded greater wages.
There is as little foundation for such an innuendo as there is for the view which regards this depreciation as an issue of base money. It was simply a Page 47 measure of precaution, as stopping an invisible and insidious outflow of the currency.
Looked at historically, and not at all controversially, such results as have been just described can only be attributed to the European monetary system of the time. Apart altogether from the arbitrary debasement of the coin, as, e.g., in France—apart even from changes of the ratio enacted with the mere crafty design of inducing a flow of gold, the monetary system of the time was so rough, so unscientific; the tariffing of the coins of different nations against each other was so inexact, so much a matter of rule-of-thumb, of hasty average, that it was simply impossible to issue such general tables of equivalents of coins and such a ratio as would have given stability to the various coinages of Europe. If the currency system of England had been of silver alone, a single enactment lessening the content