Buddy, can ya spare a groat?

"I never robbed the soldiers of their pay,
nor ever had one penny bribe from France
.............any groat I hoarded to my use,
Be brought against me at my trial-day!"

                                                Henry VI, Part 2       (III, i)

Shakespeare's Duke of Gloucester is vehemently denying any accusations of graft or corruption, in an era filled with it. It was a simple matter of the mice playing while the cat was away: King Henry VI was drifting into a severe state of mental illness, and he wasn't too sharp even when he was sane. Henry had the bad habit of trusting the wrong people, when he would have been much better off trusting no one.

Pictured above is a silver English groat once in the collection of Agecroft Hall, bearing the likeness of a king used to represent both Henry VI and Henry VII, in this case probably the latter. Earlier kings had also been represented similarly. At that time, facial images and profiles on coins tended to be more idealized, with less emphasis on accurate resemblance than we're used to today.

Henry VI came to the throne as an infant in 1422 and remained there until 1461, when his crown was usurped by Edward IV during the Wars of the Roses. He briefly regained the throne from 1470-71 before the Yorkist Edward was again returned to power. Chaotic and confusing, isn't it? Welcome to England in the 15th century.

The inscription around the edge of the coin reads in abbreviated Latin:  HENRIC DI GRA REX ANGL Z FRANC, which translates as "Henry by the Grace of God King of England and France."

Worth the equivalent of four English pence, the groat for that reason also came to be referred to as a "fuppence." This particular groat coin, like so many, may have been clipped about the edges. That was a common practice, since silver has always been a precious metal and by snipping small pieces off the edges of enough coins, the pieces could then be melted down in a lump and made into some other object. Gold coins were frequently treated in the same manner, and entire coins were sometimes melted down.

Merchants were widely known to use small measuring scales, simple balance devices, to determine whether a particular coin had a weight that was within the limits of what that particular coin should weigh. Too much edge clipping eventually led to too light a coin, and the Crown made ineffectual efforts to stamp out the practice, which was rampant throughout Europe.

Interestingly, there has been conjecture that the source of the gold and silver in the Staffordshire Hoard, discovered in 2009, may have been Roman coinage that was melted down to create the many items of Anglo-Saxon military-related hardware found in the hoard. This magnificent treasure had been buried in a field near Hammerwich, for reasons that at present can only be guessed at. The metalwork is tentatively dated to the 7th or 8th centuries; the area of discovery was then a part of the powerful kingdom of Mercia.