There was a lack of coins in Britain’s American colonies, one reason being that in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was illegal to export British silver coinage to the colonies, although copper coins could be legally used. Additionally, colonists weren’t allowed to mint their own coins as this was solely a royal prerogative. In place of British silver coins, those from many different nations were used. This wasn’t a problem, because all coins were more or less worth there weight in silver or gold, so it wasn’t important which head of monarch or national emblem was imprinted on it. The foreign coins found in the colonies included German thalers and French écus. The most popular coin was the Spanish milled dollar, or piece of eight, which was legal tender in the US until the 1850s.
Coins were widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries in a time when no real paper money was in use. The denominations of the coins of the time might seem unusual to us today, but decimalisation of the coinage didn’t occur in the United Kingdom and Ireland until 15th February 1971. Before that date the currency of pounds, shillings, and pence had totally different values. The British pound sterling and the Irish pound were subdivided into 20 shillings, each with a value of 12 old pence, giving a total of 240 pence in a pound. With decimalisation, the pound kept its old value and name, but the shilling was abolished and the pound was divided into 100 new pence. Between 794 and 1200, the silver penny was the only denomination of coin in Western Europe until larger coins were introduced in the mid-13th century.
By the time the Great Fire occurred, London was by far the largest city in England. Its inhabitants numbering between 300,000 and 400,000, it had become a crowded, unregulated sprawl of houses. This wasn’t the first large scale fire, the city having experienced several major fires in the past, the most recent having been in 1633. Additionally, London had been hit by an epidemic of bubonic plague called the Great Plague of London only the year before, during which between 60,000 and 100,000 are thought to have died. As well as disease, fires were always a danger in a city made mostly of timber and tar paper. There were so many possible causes: fireplaces, candles, ovens, lamps, as well a large stores of combustibles such as pitch and hemp. To combat the perpetual danger, there were watchmen, also known as bellmen, who patrolled the city at night, who sounded the alarm should a fire break out.…
Leisler’s Rebellion took place in New York in 1689. New York had only become an English colony in 1664 during the reign of James II. It previously had the name New Amsterdam and was part of the Dutch colony New Netherlands. After the Director-General Peter Stuyvesant surrendered to English troops, the Dutch residents were permitted to remain in the colony and were granted religious freedom. The Dutch briefly regained the colony in 1673, but it became English again under the Treaty of Westminster, which ended the third Anglo-Dutch war. The governor of the colony of New York wasn’t keen to allow an elected representative assembly, instead letting it effectively be ruled by an oligarchy of wealthy merchants. In 1688 New York became a part of the Dominion of New England, governed by Sir Edmond Andros, who governed in an autocratically with no elected legislature.
Although a Bourbon king, Philip V, took the throne of Spain after