 Early modern philosophers weighed in on legal monetary interventions, notably debasement, devaluation, or recoinage. For most, the preferred policy was to leave the money stock untouched, or restore its nominal metallic value given the widespread hammering and clipping of coins. In the fourteenth century, the French crown had altered the currency, mostly with debasements, more than eighty times. As Bodin recognized, this increased the money supply and hence raised prices, but it also undermined confidence in the stability of the currency. There is no greater incident of leading philosophers tampering with the money supply than when Locke and Newton famously oversaw the Great Recoinage of 1696. Locke persuaded Newton to do the opposite of a debasement, namely to restore the silver content of the shilling to the amount stipulated by Elizabeth I circa 1600 (see Appleby 1978; Vaughn 1980). Newton thus affirmed Locke’s belief in essentialism (see Caffentzis 1989). This meant that those willing to break the law benefitted from a de facto money pump, and the crown lost some two million pounds (roughly thirty million pounds in total was in circulation). This contraction of the money supply engendered an economic downturn, but for other reasons the English economy began to expand and flourish under the reign of Queen Anne.