nvicted
looked on themselves as murdered men, and were firm in the belief that
their sin, if sin it were, was as venial as that of a schoolboy who goes
nutting in the wood of a neighbour. All the eloquence of the ordinary
could seldom induce them to conform to the wholesome usage of
acknowledging in their dying speeches the enormity of their wickedness.
[633]

The evil proceeded with constantly accelerating velocity. At length in
the autumn of 1695 it could hardly be said that the country possessed,
for practical purposes, any measure of the value of commodities. It was
a mere chance whether what was called a shilling was really tenpence,
sixpence or a groat. The results of some experiments which were tried at
that time deserve to be mentioned. The officers of the Exchequer weighed
fifty-seven thousand two hundred pounds of hammered money which had
recently been paid in. The weight ought to have been above two hundred
and twenty thousand ounces. It proved to be under one hundred and
fourteen thousand ounces. [634] Three eminent London goldsmiths were
invited to send a hundred pounds each in current silver to be tried by
the balance. Three hundred pounds ought to have weighed about twelve
hundred ounces. The actual weight proved to be six hundred and
twenty-four ounces. The same test was applied in various parts of the
kingdom. It was found that a hundred pounds, which should have weighed
about four hundred ounces, did actually weigh at Bristol two hundred and
forty ounces, at Cambridge two hundred and three, at Exeter one hundred
and eighty, and at Oxford only one hundred and sixteen. [635] There
were, indeed, some northern districts into which the clipped money had
only begun to find its way. An honest Quaker, who lived in one of these
districts, recorded, in some notes which are still extant, the amazement
with which, when he travelled southward, shopkeepers and innkeepers
stared at the broad and heavy halfcrowns with which he paid his way.
They asked whence he came, and where such money was to be found. The
guinea which he purchased for twenty-two shillings at Lancaster bore a
different value at every stage of his journey. When he reached London
it was worth thirty shillings, and would indeed have been worth more had
not the government fixed that rate as the highest at which gold should
be received in the payment of taxes. [636]

The evils produced by this state of the currency were not such as have
generally been