Only in #England, from 1663 onward, were coins produced exclusively by machine, then their weight verified and minted using a lever press. But even there, alongside this magnificent coin—which, as contemporaries said, was truly unparalleled at the time—an older coin, minted using the same method, continued to circulate for nearly 70 years (it was completely withdrawn from circulation from 1732 onward). Consequently, England, too, experienced monetary crises in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Meanwhile, not only did the government, unlike other countries, not derive any revenue from the coinage, but even the very costs of minting (from 1666) were entirely absorbed by the treasury (something that still does not exist in other countries), so that the coin's nominal value and its actual metal content were identical. But coin crises occurred because the old-fashioned coinage was displacing the new, machine-made coinage. The old coinage, being neither round nor uniform in thickness, was easily clipped, and the best specimens were removed from circulation. As a result, only debased and clipped coins remained in circulation, having lost on average 40-50% of their nominal value, and in some cases only 1/4 or 1/6 of it. In 1696, this led to even merchants losing their heads, and the farmer having to deal, on the one hand, with people who paid money at face value, and on the other, with people who would only accept it by weight (i.e., at approximately half its face value). As a result, when experiments with weighing coins were carried out in 1695, it was found that the 57,200 pounds of hammered silver deposited in the treasury weighed only 114,000 ounces, instead of 220,000 ounces, i.e., half; 100 pounds sterling, which should have contained about 400 ounces, actually had 240 ounces in Bristol, 203 in Cambridge, 180 in Exeter, and only 116 ounces in Oxford. The decline in the weight of silver coins was particularly acute in the 1690s. The evil wrought by such a state of coinage is not one of those things to which history assigns a place of honor. Nevertheless, one can hardly compare all the misfortunes inflicted on the people over the course of a quarter of a century by bad ministers, bad parliaments, and bad judges with those who produced bad crowns and bad shillings. The reigns of Charles and James, however hard they were on the people, never hindered the peaceful course of daily life. At the very time when the honor and independence of the state were being sold to another power, when rights were trampled underfoot, and the fundamental laws of the land were violated, hundreds of thousands of diligent families worked, sat down to table, and went to bed peacefully and securely, cattlemen drove their oxen to market, merchants weighed their goods, clothiers measured out their cloth, buyers and sellers in the cities behaved especially noisily, and harvest festivals in the villages were celebrated even more joyfully than before. When the great instrument of circulation fell into complete disarray, commerce and industry stagnated. Evil was felt daily and hourly, everywhere and by all classes of the population: on the manor and in the barn, at the anvil and at the loom, on the ocean waves and in the bowels of the earth. Nothing could be bought without misunderstandings. At every stall, quarrels erupted from morning until evening. Clashes between workers and employers occurred regularly every Saturday. At the fair and the market, there was constant noise, shouting, cursing, and cursing, and it was a special blessing if the matter ended without broken chests or murder.