Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network.

I'm your host, Heather Tesco, and I'm a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe

it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and be more deeply in

touch with our own humanity. This is episode 143 and it's about the great debasement. The who what now?

The great debasement. Otherwise known as the event that gave Henry VIII his moniker of old coppernose. Also, an amazing con job that Henry perpetrated on his

own people. So, let's discuss. But first off, I want to just plug the Agora podcast of the month, if you're looking for

something new to listen to right now, is the Mid-Atlantic.

Mid-Atlantic looks at politics and current events in Britain and the U.S.

And each show consists of American and British pundits reviewing and commenting on the most

important U.S. and British pieces of news that week with host Royfield Brown officiating.

And so if you're into news and current events, you should definitely check out Mid-Atlantic

wherever you are listening to this show.

All right. So, what was the great debasement?

In short, it was an economic policy that stretched on for about a dozen years,

never actually got worked out until the reign of Elizabeth,

and it basically destroyed the economy for a while. So as you may already know, money used to be

based on weight. A pound in currency was literally a pound in weight. If you wanted to buy something

for two pounds, you literally took two pounds of silver in weight to buy it.

There were smaller denominations based on cutting the coins into fractions of a pound, but everything

was still based on the trust that people had that a pound of silver, a pound sterling, was truly

a pound in weight. And then all of the coins that were

fractions of that had the same amount of silver in. In essence, a coin is a promise, guaranteed by a

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