The term sovereign, referring to a coin, fell from use—it does not appear in Samuel Johnson's dictionary, compiled in the 1750s. The British economy was disrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, and gold was hoarded. Among the measures taken to allow trade to continue was the issue of one-pound banknotes. The public came to like them as more convenient than the odd-value guinea. After the war, Parliament, by the Coinage Act 1816, placed Britain officially on the gold standard, with the pound to be defined as a given quantity of gold. Almost every speaker supported having a coin valued at twenty shillings, rather than continuing to use the guinea. Nevertheless, the Coinage Act did not specify which coins the Mint should strike. A committee of the Privy Council recommended gold coins of ten shillings, twenty shillings, two pounds and five pounds be issued, and this was accepted by George, Prince Regent on 3 August 1816. The twenty-shilling piece was named a sovereign, with the resurrection of the old name possibly promoted by antiquarians with numismatic interests. William Wellesley Pole, elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, was appointed Master of the Mint (at that time a junior government position) in 1812, with a mandate to reform the Royal Mint. Pole had favoured retaining the guinea, due to the number extant and the amount of labour required to replace them with sovereigns. Formal instruction to the Mint came with an indenture dated February 1817, directing the Royal Mint to strike gold coins weighing 7.988 grams, that is to say, the new sovereign. The Italian sculptor Benedetto Pistrucci came to London early in 1816. His talent opened the doors of the capital's elite, among them Lady Spencer, who showed Pistrucci a model in wax of Saint George and the Dragon by Nathaniel Marchant and commissioned him to reproduce it in the Greek style as part of her husband's regalia as a Knight of the Garter. Pistrucci had already been thinking of such a work, and he produced the cameo. The model for the saint was an Italian waiter at Brunet's Hotel in Leicester Square, where he had stayed after coming to London. In 1816, Pole hired Pistrucci to create models for the new coinage. After completing Lady Spencer's commission, by most accounts, Pistrucci suggested to Pole that an appropriate subject for the sovereign would be Saint George.