were hammer struck, rather than milled, and were unequal in weight, round-
ness, and thickness.^115 The clippings thus easily obtained could be melted down
as bullion or mixed with base metal and cast into counterfeit coins. These activ-
ities were illegal. Indeed, counterfeiting and clipping were high treason and
could be punished by the dreadful penalties reserved for that most serious form
of crime. But the temptations were very strong and what had long been an en-
demic problem became particularly serious in the 1680 s, when treasury and
mint officials were complaining that the country was ‘infested’ with coiners, and
was suffering from ‘the current going about of so much clipt money’.^116
The attack on the coinage only became worse when England was drawn into
the war in 1689 and especially when the government—after considerable and
contentious debate—came to the decision to recall the old silver coins at face
value and carry out a general recoinage.^117 Speculation that such a plan was in
the offing only encouraged an even greater assault in 1694 and 1695 that
brought the coinage to a crisis point since it was clear that new coins with milled
edges would be much more difficult to clip. The inflation and the disruptions in
the economy that accompanied the Great Recoinage that began in the follow-
ing year bore particularly hard on the working population.
Along with serious harvest failures and interruptions in trade caused by
French raiding, the crisis in the coinage made the 1690 s what has been called
‘a decade of distress for the poor of the metropolis’.^118 That unemployment re-
mained high in the 1690 s, despite the war, is suggested by a frequently expressed
concern about vagrancy and the numbers of beggars in the streets of the cap-
ital, and by a renewed interest in this period in the use of houses of correction as
a means of disciplining the labouring population, and the establishment of the
London workhouse to put men and women to work who would otherwise press
for outdoor relief under the Poor Laws.^119 The difficulties that so many people
obviously found themselves in at least help to explain why prosecutions for theft
and other property offences did not diminish during the war in the 1690 s, as
they were to do during every subsequent war in the eighteenth century. And the
peace of 1697 only made things worse by adding demobilized troops to the Lon-
don labour market. In the last years of the century prosecutions rose to heights
that were unmatched in the ninety-year period we have studied.
Better harvests and a fall in prices in 1700 , on the other hand, relieved some
of the difficulties experienced by the working population; and perhaps even
more the war that began two years later, a war in which exceptionally large
forces were raised for the army and navy, and in which a more effective convoy44 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^115) Challis, New History of the Mint, 380. (^116) CTB, 1681 – 5 , p. 1,584; CTB, 1685 – 9 , p. 590.
(^117) The government also attempted to prevent the assault on the coinage by statutes that added penal-
ties for the possession of tools for clipping and counterfeiting and rewards for the conviction of offenders:
6 & 7 Wm III, c. 17 ( 1695 ); 8 & 9 Wm III, c. 26 ( 1697 ).
(^118) Stephen Macfarlane, ‘Social Policy and the Poor in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Beier and
Finlay (eds.), London, 1500 – 1700 , 259.
(^119) Ibid., 254 – 8 ; Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor’, 79 – 84.
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