Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism by Christine Desan

Author:Christine Desan [Desan, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

B. The decline of tallies as currency that came at a charge

The government moved at about the same time towards paying for circulating credit. That development is only visible against the background we regained above—the old practice of using tallies as a virtual currency made out of public debt. English monarchs had long enlarged the money available for public use by anticipating revenues: it gave tallies as tax credits to public creditors for goods or services. For centuries, the government had sweetened the reward for the interest-free advance made to it by tally holders. It allowed tallies to circulate, creating a currency out of them insofar as it gave a present value to the tokens that people held.33

In the 17th century, tallies weakened and failed, taking with them the avenue they represented for sovereign borrowing. Their decline left behind a vacuum; when tallies finally died, the need for another mode of borrowing increased. But tallies had also modeled an instrument of public credit that could circulate; they were an indigenous and national form of public borrowing, one overlooked by later writers excavating precedents further afield, like the medieval municipal bonds of Venice and Florence. As tallies declined, officials would recreate instruments of circulating public debt, now interest-bearing. Buried with the story of tallies and their demise, then, are clues to the way those engineering the Restoration invented new forms of borrowing from the public and began to pay for them.

It was the constitutional warfare of the 17th century, a struggle famously inflected through finance, that destroyed tallies. Inheriting fiscal machinery with limited capacity, the early Stuarts responded by pressing their prerogative power—they reached for revenue from militia rates and ship money, seizures and sales of lands, monopolies, and licenses, colonization, forced loans, and impositions.34 Their strategy collided with the ambitions and commitments of elites within Parliament and beyond; the conflicts over revenue helped catalyze the crisis at mid-century.35

The Stuarts’ efforts to borrow using tallies fit within that struggle. Theoretically, sovereigns could anticipate taxes further and further in advance, by giving tallies for resources and emphasizing the taxes to follow.36 The more they stretched the strategy, however, the more officials exposed the vulnerabilities of a system based so transparently on the extraction of funds. The credibility and therefore viability of tallies depended on the certainty that taxes would be imposed so that the tallies could be cashed. But the argument that people could rely on heavy levies to come was never a winning one politically.

Early English governments also borrowed money voluntarily loaned for interest. Before the late 16th century, many of those loans came from abroad; they dried up with the rise of international hostilities between England, the Netherlands, and Spain at the end of the Tudor period. The Stuarts therefore turned increasingly to the domestic market for loans; they raised money primarily from large financiers, syndicates of lenders, and the Corporation of London.37 Whoever the lender, the sovereign paid for the use of a medium already “liquid,” as it were, when it borrowed money at interest.

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