Most of us have taken history courses. In those courses, we usually read books about the periods being studied. It is rare to be assigned to read many of the source documents from which historians compiled the version of history that they preferred.
Historical source documents are not particularly complicated. A typical example are The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which can be found on Google. As many ancient source documents, the Chronicles offer a digest of things that happened during the period they cover, in this case, the last part of the First Millennium and the first part of the Second in England, with passing references to occurrences in other countries. In it, they chronicle what happened to the mint operators. They debased the currency by adulterating silver with baser metals and thought no one would notice the resulting inflation.
People did notice, and many refused to accept the coin of the realm. The King ordered that all the minters involved be called to London. When they arrived, their right hands were cut off. And, they were castrated. Small wonder that historians, who are largely paid by political entities whose inflationary practices involve the continual debasing of their own currencies, never seem to mention this occurrence and the sure and certain cure it offers a government to keep its currency from being debased.
