(1) Reading With Jane Austen (The Imaginative Conservative)

(2) The Great Bullion Famine: When Europe’s money ran out (Glint)

(2a) A quote from The Brothers York by Thomas Penn:

“There was a great scarcity of money’. Prices were at rock bottom because there was no cash with which to buy anything. The bullion crisis had been brewing for decades. In recent years it had seen mints close across northern Europe and in Calais, and had been behind Edward’s aggressive insistence that foreign exporters of English wool and cloth pay half on the nail, in cash or bullion. In 1464 the crisis came to a head. While gold was used on the international markets and by princes, silver was what ordinary people used to buy goods and to trade. Now, there was barely any silver bullion left in Europe. Brokers reported that Venice’s regular galley convoys to Syria had sailed off with the last of its silver stocks, leaving the great city-state temporarily without liquid currency. Months later, Florence would endure what one appalled politician described as the city’s ‘greatest calamity’ since the famine of 1339: a wave of bankruptcies in which one overexposed bank after another – already under the strain of prolonged economic downturn and with the outbreak of war between Venice and the Ottoman Turks disrupting lucrative trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean – collapsed. With England in the grip of a deflationary spiral, and desperate to avoid antagonizing public opinion further, Edward had to explore more creative solutions to fundraising.”

(3) Explorers, Musicians And Executions: A Look Inside St Sepulchre-without-Newgate (Living London History)