The basic system of currency in Jonson’s England had 12 pence (d) in a shilling, and 20 shillings (s) in a pound. References to this money in the drama of the period might be divided into two broad groups. As Allen and Dunstan (1938-41) note, units of pounds tend to be used when describing abstract or notional sums – figures of account, overall values of lands (and see here Knights, 1937, 87-95, on the ‘growth of a land market’ in Jonsonian England), projections and debts, inheritances and incomes – but less frequently for the amounts of money physically handed over in personal monetary transactions. When sums of money are given from person to person, we more frequently encounter references and allusions to specific coins. But the values of the coins in contemporary use were not constant: they were revalued by successive statutes, and also frequently debased, and coins from previous mintings, and with potentially different values, stayed in circulation (as in Dapper’s ‘six score Edward shillings . . . an old Harry’s sovereign . . . three James shillings, and an Elizabeth groat . . .some Philip and Marys’, Alch., 3.4.142-7).

A number of English coins are mentioned in Jonson’s plays; many of these had popular or alternative names, often derived from the images or patterns stamped on them. A cross was a general name for a number of coins in circulation which had a cross stamped on the reverse. Portcullis money was the name given to a number of coins minted for the East India Company in 1600-1601, in various denominations, with a portcullis stamped on their reverse. A farthing was worth one quarter of a penny (and a harrington was a copper farthing patented in 1613 and minted by John, Lord Harrington of Exton). Penny pieces circulated as legal coinage, as did halfpennies and threepennies. A groat was equivalent to four pence, and a shilling to twelve pence. A teston could be another name for a sixpence, but it was also a coin debased in the sixteenth century and reduced in value from 12d to 4½ and 2¼ pence. A crown was worth five shillings. An angel (also popularly known as a noble) was a gold coin bearing a picture of Archangel Michael and the dragon; it was revalued by successive statutes, valued at 6s 8d when first coined in 1465, at 7s 6d in 1H8, at 8s in 34H8, and 10s in 6E6. The symbolic and metaphoric potential of its name was all the stronger since it was also typically presented as a gift of money, usually pierced and in the form of an amulet, to sufferers of scrofula in the royal ‘touching’ ceremonies still practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (D.C. Baker, 1959, 87-9). A piece was a popular name for the unite, issued in 1604 as a 20-shilling piece, but revalued in 1612 at 22 shillings (OED, n. 13b), but it could also be a general name for a coin (OED, n. 3c, 13a): the potential specificity and generality of the word (as in ‘I’ll warrant you for half a piece’, Devil, 1.4.5) makes the reference impossible to understand unambiguously as a precise sum of money, but also impossible to disregard as such. The unite was also known as a Jacobus. A sovereign was an earlier coin (first issued in 1489), worth 20 shillings at first, and then revalued through the sixteenth century at 22, 30, and then again 20 shillings. An Elizabethan ‘crown gold’ sovereign was worth 13s 6d.

Comparing average earnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with those of today is an often-used way of calculating the equivalent values of sums of early modern money. Equivalent costs of living also changed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, no less than they have since then. Brown and Hopkins (1956), 312-4, suggest that consumables were more expensive between c. 1595 to c. 1630, in relation to builders’ wages, than at almost any other time in modern economic history. The average wage for a building labourer in southern England between c. 1580 and c. 1630 remained fairly constant at 8d per day, and 12d for a craftsman (Brown and Hopkins, 1956). Very roughly, then, a conversion on the basis of wage rates would mean that every penny of Jonson’s corresponds to something like £10 in London in the first decade of the twenty-first century (or, depending on currency exchange rates, somewhere roughly around 15 US dollars). The fact that a penny was the price for cheap entrance to the Globe Theatre at the end of the sixteenth century suggests that this might not be an entirely inaccurate conversion rate. It means, though, that coins of higher denomination are worth considerable sums in modern money: an angel would be the equivalent of several hundred early twenty-first-century pounds, and every pound mentioned by Jonson would be worth thousands of pounds. Other indexes of purchasing power (see ‘How Much is that Worth Today?’ website), though, suggest that a pound from c. 1600 is worth closer to a hundred pounds from c. 2000. The truth may be not just that the difficulty of comparing costs of living and ways of life over hundreds of years will always make these comparisons rather arbitrary, but that many of the sums mentioned in Jonson’s plays are so large that it is their very magnitude, rather than their exact value, that we are meant to appreciate. When Merecraft speaks in The Devil Is an Ass about his project ‘which will arise / To eighteen millions, seven the first year’ (2.1.50-1), he is talking about a sum of money too high to be practicably calculable, or even comprehensible.

Roman coins are mentioned in Sejanus, Catiline, and Poetaster, as are Greek coins that were understood to have passed into currency in Rome. Much of Jonson’s information here came from Budé’s De Asse (1514), an account of Roman weights and measures to which he refers in a marginal reference in Sejanus. A drachma, according to Thomas Thomas’s English-Latin dictionary of 1587, which also provides approximate rates of conversion into contemporary English money, was ‘a coin signed with a bullock counterpeyning an old sterling groat of 8. to the ounce’ (Thomas, 1587, T4v). A sesterce was ‘a coin among the Romans, whereof Denarius contained four’ (Thomas, 1587, fol. 3H6); a thousand sesterces was known as a sestertium: ‘Mille sestertij & Mille nummi . . . Five and twenty crowns French, five pounds sterling’ (Thomas, 1587,, fol. 3H6). A marginal note to Sej., 1.183 notes that 50 sestertia is worth ‘Monetae nostrae 375. , a conversion of approximately 133 sesterces per pound, or seven and a half pounds sterling per sestertium. A talent was ‘a value of money among the Greeks, whereof were two sorts, Talentum Atticum maius containing 80. Minas, every Mina valuing 100. Drachmas, or Denarios, & every Drachma being a groat sterling when 8 went to an ounce, and by that rate doth rise to 133. pounds and odd money. Talentum Atticum minus, which is most spoken of in authors, containeth 60. Minas’ (Thomas, 1587, 3M6). As Thomas goes on to explain, though, the value of the coin could differ and is impossible to determine exactly: ‘There be many other talents of sundry countries, the value whereof is uncertain according as the value of Mina doth alter.’

Italian coins are much mentioned in Volpone, notably in the dazzle of mercantile language in the mountebank scene (2.2), and in a number of other plays. Their values are explained in two books with links to that play: John Florio’s World of Words (1611) and Thomas Coryate’s Coryates Crudities (1611). Coryate writes about two things that make the value of Venetian currency difficult to calculate; firstly, that there are many foreign coins circulating in the city, and secondly that the sharp practices of Venetian merchants make it difficult for the English traveller to convert his money into local currency: ‘every man will take thy Livers [large brass coins, according to Coryate known as ‘moneta de banco, that is, the money of the exchange’] without any loss to thee, but none thy gold without some advantage to themselves, and damage to thee, except thou dost buy a commodity of some value. For thou shalt not find that kindness in Venice to have thy gold changed gratìs into small currant pieces of the city, as in England’ ( Crudities, 287).

It is the small current pieces, not the livers, that are frequently mentioned in Volpone. A bagatine, according to Florio (1611), 51, who refers to it as a bagatino, was ‘a little coin in Italy’; according to Fischer (1985), 44, it was the equivalent of one twelfth of a penny. A sol was a coin of small value, ‘almost an half penny’ (Coryate, 1611, 286), though it could also denote a French coin of the approximate value of a shilling, containing twelve deniers and one twentieth of the value of a livre (Fischer, 1985), 92). A gazet, according to Coryate (1611), 185, was worth ‘not fully an English penny’. Florio (1611) defines a moccenigo as ‘a kind of coin in Venice’ (317); it was worth about nine pence (OED). A chequin was a Venetian gold coin. Coryate calls it a chiquiney, and writes that ‘this piece doth much vary in the value. For sometimes it is high, sometimes low’ (285); he says that when he was in Venice it was worth eleven livers and twelve sols, which ‘countervaileth eight shillings and eight pence halfpenny of our money’ (285), but that in England it just raises 7s. Florio, 614, calls it a zecchina, and says that it is ‘worth about seven shillings and six pence sterling’. Of the ducat, Coryate, 286, writes that ‘ word doth not signify any one certain coin’. Golden ducats were units of currency in many European countries, those in Holland, Russia, Austria and Sweden equivalent to about 9s 4d, and Italian silver ducats were worth approximately 3s 6d (OED, 1(a)). It was also a money of account in Venice, probably worth about 3s 4d throughout the seventeenth century (see Fischer, 1985, 69-70, 152); Lewes Roberts (1638), 68, in writing about Venice, mentions ‘two sorts of Duccats, the one current in payment, which many be valued sterl. about 3s 4d and the other of banco, which may be valued about 4s or 4s 2d as the Exchange will admit’. The section of his Merchants Mappe of Commerce on exchanges describes a practical exchange rate between London and Venice of 56¼ pence per ducat (Roberts, 1638, fols. 112v-113). Other foreign currencies also appear in Jonson’s plays: the Anabaptists in The Alchemist bring references to Dutch dollars and marks. A Portuguese portague (also known as a crusado) was a gold coin that was worth between three and five pounds of English money. A Spanish piece of eight (worth eight reales) was current in the seventeenth century for 4s 6d, and a pistolet (a smaller pistole) was current in 1560 for 5s 10d (Fischer, 1985, 105).

English coins are also mentioned in plays that have an ostensibly Italian setting, and also in Poetaster (‘forty – shillings’, 3.4.135; ‘a shilling or two’, 3.4.142, etc.). Volpone’s performance as Scoto Mantuano, for example, has him mixing references to English and Italian currencies: ‘You shall not give me six crowns, nor five, nor four, nor three, nor two, nor one; nor half a ducat; no, nor a moccenigo. Six pence it will cost you, or six hundred pound’ (Volp., 2.2.178-80). And the currency in the Florence of EMI (Q) seems to consist entirely of English coins – shillings and angels and crowns. As Coryate writes, certain foreign currencies were indeed legal tender in Venice: ‘There are sundry coins both of gold & silver allowed in the city of Venice, besides their own stamp; as the French crowns: the single and double ducats which are the Emperors coin: single and double pistolets of Spain: The Hungarian gold which they call Hungars: The Popes gold: The Dutch dollars, &c. But I saw none of our English there: or if there be any, there is loss by it whether it be gold or silver’ (Coryate, 1611, 285). It is also possible that we should see Volpone at that point as identifying a pair of English listeners – Sir Politic Would-be and Peregrine – in his audience, and directing the references to English currency at them, though this could hardly be the explanation in the Italian version of Every Man in his Humour for Matheo’s ‘I have not past two shillings, or so’ (EMI (Q), 1.3.189), and so on. The incongruity in Volpone’s speech seems to be deliberate, and it can hardly be the case, even if Jonson and some of his spectators knew about Venetian currency, that he would have expected his whole audience to do so. But the comedy of the speech works with or without a knowledge of the value of the Italian coins in question, or even a knowledge that Volpone is indeed referring to Italian coins at all; either way, we see his talk as an example of his improvised salesmanship, and Sir Politic’s reaction as an example of his inability to understand its incongruity. While, on the one hand, Jonson’s references to money seem to be deliberately chosen (and, in such places as the Sejanus marginal note, to advertise themselves as precisely researched and capable of being converted into English equivalents), it seems that in many cases their chief effect might reside less in their exact sum than in the mere fact that a figure, often highly exaggerated, is stated. While the question of money is at least as relevant to Jonson’s writings as it is to any other early modern literature, we might usefully remain sceptical about whether a calculation of the equivalent modern values of Jonsonian sums of money is always going to be precise, or even worthwhile.