The diminution in the weight of the penny was slow and did not affect wholesale dealings in which payment was usually made by weight.[35]
Clipping the pennies, against which crime frequent statutes threatened punishment, affected the poor who paid and were paid by tale, not by weight. It afforded a pretext for occasionally raiding the Jews and plundering their store of coin, always found of course to have been clipped.
In all but retail transactions payment might be agreed to be by weight. In Stephen’s reign the land-revenue of countries was farmed out. The sheriff or ‘fermour’ of Wiltshire and Dorsetshire paid into the treasury £454 10_s._ by weight (ad pensum) and £262 4_s._ by tale (numero). He probably picked out the full-weight coins for payment by tale, and had to take (as perhaps he received) weight-value for the rest.
Under Henry IV the sterling had fallen to 15 grains; under Edward IV it fell to 12 grains, at which weight it stood till Henry VIII brought it down to 10-1/2 grains, and also debased it to only one-third its weight of silver. His father had coined shillings, hitherto only a money of account; his own mint continued this coinage, but got 48 of them, instead of 20, from the Troy pound of silver, and subsequently by debasement nearly 150.
In Edward VI’s reign the Protector Somerset continued this system, but, at his fall, efforts were made by the Council to restore honesty to the coinage, at least as regards the shillings and crowns. The pennies remained debased until the wisdom of Elizabeth restored the standard, and since that time our silver coinage has remained of true standard and at the weight of 7-1/2 grains for each penny value, or one-third of its weight at the time of the Norman Conquest. The Scots silver coinage fell much lower than that of England; by the time of the Union it had fallen to 1/36, the pound Scots being worth 20 pence English, instead of 20 shillings.
It is curious that the kings, so ready to make a profit by lowering the silver coins, appear to have disdained the evident profit of a copper coinage. Penalties were repeatedly threatened by statute against the copper coins which necessity of ‘change’ caused to be made or imported. These were unlawful coins called galyhalpens, saskyns, dodekyns and dotkins (probably Scottish ‘doits’). James I granted a patent for the making of copper farthings. Halfpennies were first coined in Charles II’s time, but it was not till near the end of George III’s reign that a copper penny was struck, probably because the tradition of the silver penny weighing 32 wheat-corns, albeit shrunken, was against the penny being other than silver.