ABSTRACT
Out of the continuous story of monetary experiment, which is English history, the text-books pick out one or two passing incidents and give us their account of them. Thus, after no word has been said about the management of the currency during the Middle Ages, a paragraph or two is usually devoted to the debasement of the coinage by Henry VIII—for it is one of the few instances in history of an English King mismanaging the currency. After Henry VIII the river of money plunges underground again. The story of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is told as if their controversies were entirely political and religious. Take, for instance, such a book as Professor Neale’s Queen Elizabeth, which has recently been praised to the skies, or the work of Professor Trevelyan. For all that the painful student can understand there might have been no problems of money at all from Henry VIII’s day until, a volume later on, he finds that in George I’s time there was something called the South Sea Bubble. It seems to be a working rule with writers of School Certificate text-books that one, and not more than one, monetary experiment may be referred to in each volume.
