Ace said:
I always thought the Viking approach to coins was interesting-- silver was rated by weight -- infact they had something called hacksilver -- basically a thin piece of metal you could hack off a chunk of to use as currency
Not just Vikings. The British Pound is Pounds Sterling, and was exactly that, a pound of silver.
Until milled edges became common coins were amazingly irregular, just take a blob of copper, bronze, silver, or gold then stamp it into a flat disk with a mold, the edges were by no means uniform.
The alloy used was also variable in purity. One king of England picked up the nickname 'copper nose' because he had debased the gold coins with so much copper that at the high points (such as the king's nose) the gold rubbed away.
Merchants would use scales and slates, you took the coin and struck it upon the slate, then judged the purity of the coins by the color of the streak left on the slate. Of course this only made it easier to clip the coin.
The ease of the crime was part of the reason for such severe punishments, the only way to prevent it was to make the cost of being caught so horrific that most people wouldn't dare take the risk.
And the Romans when shipping silver from England to Rome did not even allow the pigs to be purified on site, requireing the silver pigs, better than 90% lead, to be shipped to the city of Rome to be smelted and purified.
The Auld Grump
