ABSTRACT
After the Napoleonic Wars, during which Britain had had an inconvertible paper currency convertibility into gold was restored in 1821. As discussed in Chapter 7, a key point of Lord Liverpool’s Act of 1816 formalising the gold standard was that silver coins, legal tender for no more than £2, were deliberately struck underweight. The bullion value of the silver content was at a 7.5 per cent discount to their value in tale i.e. as legal tender. This coinage system was to survive until 1914. It had its tribulations but these were trivial compared with the coinage problems suffered elsewhere.
