Debasement has always commanded a high degree of interest among historians, and rightly so. Strong currencies of high intrinsic worth are associated with successful trading nations, but also have connotations of probity and high moral worth. Reductions in the intrinsic content of the coinage seem in contrast to speak of spendthrift government policies, and dissolute behaviour born of lax personal and national standards of behaviour. Debasement is also often associated with deception and downright fraud, since the extent of the reduction in intrinsic content was often concealed from the public. Nevertheless, despite such attempted secrecy, debasements usually resulted in some (unpredictable) degree of price inflation, which was almost always widely unpopular.

Debasement undermines the functions and use of money in all its principal respects. Whether money was used as a measure or store of value, its alteration obviously reduced its ability to fulfilits core functions. Debasement also disrupted the operation of money as a medium of exchange, arguably its principal use in medieval and early modern societies. It introduced uncertainty, created winners and losers, and undermined confidence in established social and economic values, in both domestic and international trade and certainly also for all payments made for factors of production (labour, land, capital).

Nevertheless, despite the unpopularity of debasement, consideration of the needs of commerce leads to a more rounded view, which recognizes that reduction in the intrinsic content of the money was not in every case mistaken. Indeed, it is clear that in certain circumstances a currency might be too strong. Rather than simplistically declaring sound money to be good and weak money to be bad, a more sophisticated analysis is required which also considers how far the currency was capable of supplying the needs of the economy.

This chapter, rather than charting the sorry progress of debasement and its effects, looks instead at a period of English history in which too much stress may have been laid on the importance of retaining a high value silver coinage of unchanging worth, despite major shift s in the international values of precious metals.