Wants: BASED
A fortnightly meditation on something for sale
Edward VI (Henry VIII posthumous) debased silver Sixpence of Dublin, Ireland, available from Lockdales (est. £150 - £200)
We’ve been thinking about currency debasement recently. In a world of ever-mounting national debt, states have been servicing that debt by printing money and tolerating inflation. Under such conditions, some investors have been driven by a fear of continued currency debasement to material assets like metals and commodities. While the last year has seen gold and silver pounding at the door of all time highs and civilians are stroking their chins on the tube at Trading212, we at Abscondita have been coveting the hard asset of 16th century English coinage — though not for its purchasing power.
The ‘Great Debasement’ of Tudor England was incubated by the expensive wars that Henry VIII fought against France in the 1540s. It meant not just diminished purchasing power of paper currency as we see today, but a literal debasement – degradation, cheapening – of the metals used to signal that purchasing power. Coins that had been close to sterling standard (92.5% silver) in previous decades, were minted in an increasingly compromised copper alloy and silver wash.
The King’s nose being the most protuberant part of the coin, it was the first where the silver wash would be abraded in the purses of Tudor traders, leaving the king with a symbolically reddened snout – and yielding the nickname ‘Old Coppernose’.
The verb to mint has nothing to do with the herb Mentha, but comes from the Old English mynet, meaning coin or money, which derives itself from the Latin moneta; a term that hints at the faith involved in making money.
In ancient Rome, coins were produced in the Temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitoline Hill; Juno was the goddess of money and finance and her title meant something like ‘the one who warns’. From this holy site, the Romans made their coinage, and over time moneta came to mean both money and the place where money is made. The word yokes together divergent strands of historical memory: money, authority and faith melted into each other and stamped with the ruler’s image.
Cash is king, your barber says. But is that still true when king is red-nosed and the cash debased? Who determines that the coins are worth something? The Emperor does? The goddess does? In this case, we do. Not for their chequered record as a store of value, but for their skanky pedigree and symbolic place in this story.
These coins are a token of the age-old dance of desire and currency, to which we all still shuffle and gurn today. And like any two-step, it moves in both directions: the so-called debasement trade roared through 2025 but, amid the fallout following the US and Israel’s war in Iran, a lot of investors have turned back towards cash. Five centuries after Old Coppernose, the question of cash’s kingship will keep keeping people up at night.
Money…it’s a gas!
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This Edward VI (Henry VIII posthumous) debased silver Sixpence of Dublin is part of the forthcoming Coins & Militaria auction at Lockdales in Ipswich, Suffolk beginning 24 March.