ABSTRACT
The real revolution came when the countries which until that moment in the High Middle Ages had minted nothing officially, except silver, returned to gold. The shortage of gold was a nuisance worse during the High Middle Ages than previously or subsequently. Since the prehistoric period and Roman days many of the veins had been exhausted or only yielded minimal quantities of gold; the mines in Ireland. In the first place the minting of gold seemed to serve the interests and prestige of the coming powers; also it served commercial needs which to a large extent inspired the English decisions of 1343. It was helped by the additional fact that merchants, being obliged to settle their transactions abroad in gold, were suffering very heavy losses in the process of exchange, whose repercussions were to the detriment of the consumer. Gold coins, unlike silver, no matter where they came from, almost always enjoyed a quasi-universal currency.
