In the fifteenth century England had one unified national currency, under the sole control of the monarch, in principle at least. This had been the case since the tenth century but it was an exceptional situation in medieval Europe. The king appointed mint officials and received a share of the profits they made. Offences against the king’s coinage were felonies or treason, to be punished in his courts. There were limits to royal control of the coinage, however. The rights to the production and profits of coinage were delegated to the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the bishop of Durham in their cathedral cities by long-established custom. The royal and ecclesiastical mints produced coins according to standards of weight and fineness authorized by the king, but parliaments might claim a role in decisions to change the standards, and in many other aspects of the administration of the coinage. More fundamentally, king and parliament struggled, not always with success, to defend the English currency and the mints that made it against the competition of foreign mints and the powerful effects of changes in international supplies of gold and silver.

When Henry IV took the throne in 1399 the English coinage had been essentially unchanged for nearly half a century. There were three gold coins: the noble, worth 6s. 8d. (one third of a pound or half of a mark), and its half and quarter; and five silver coins: the groat (4d.), halfgroat, penny, halfpenny and farthing. The weights and basic designs of these coins had not been altered since 1351, and Henry IV made no alteration in 1399: it was even possible to continue to use some of Richard II’s coin dies, changing the king’s name on them as necessary. The designs of the silver coins remained unchanged until the reign of Henry VII – public confidence in the coinage might have been jeopardised by any unavoidable change – but a radical reform of the coinage by Edward IV in 1464–5 included the introduction of new gold coins prominently displaying Yorkist roses and Edward’s personal symbol of the ‘sun-in-splendour’: the ryal of 10s. (see Figure 1, facing) and its half and quarter, and the angel of 6s. 8d.