In spite of such recommendation as this the measure was not adopted, and Richard fell back on his previous expedients, crying down by proclamation the value of the Scotch coins, 1387, and of the gold coins of Flanders and Brabant, 1393, and ordaining by enactment that exporters of goods should bring in 1 oz. of gold for every sack of wool which they sold.
Such an ordinance as this last is of the commonest and most frequent occurrence in the enactments of fifteenth-century England, but always unworkable as warring against the most elementary principles of international trade.
On his accession, therefore, Henry IV. found himself heir to an accumulation of monetary evil, through the impolicy and want of courage of Richard.
He was obliged, at the request of the mayors and merchants of the staple of Calais, to abolish the last unworkable ordinance just referred to, and attempted at the same time to provide a positive remedy by reviving a proclamation against the currency of silver halfpennies brought from Venice, of which three or four only were equal to one sterling in value. In 1401 the Commons complained in Parliament that nobles of Flanders were so common in England that a man could not receive a sum of 100 shillings without taking three or four such nobles, each of them more feeble than the English noble by two-pence.
A statute was accordingly passed, enacting that all money of gold and silver of the coin of Flanders and all other lands, and of Scotland, should be voided out of the land, or put to coin to the bullion.
It was all in vain. Two years later, 1403, the Commons again complained of the depletion of gold, and again a statute was passed, and so on. This futile process actually reproduces itself yearly up to 1411, when at last the question of a recoinage was fairly faced. By the ordinance for, and regulation of, the money of the realm, of that year, it was provided that, "because of the great scarcity of money at the time," the Master of the Mint should make of every pound of gold 50 nobles, and of silver 30 shillings of esterlings of old alloy.
This recoinage was carried out and finished in the third year of Henry V., 1414. Under it the contents of the silver penny sank from 18 to 15 grs., and of the gold noble from 120 to 108 grs., the consequent change in the ratio being from 11.15, which had prevailed since 1353 to 10.33.