As the decades passed, England grew ever more enmeshed in what was increasingly a global network of trade, and by the 1680s the exchange rate between silver and gold differed from place to place in Europe. Critically, if you melted down the silver in a full-weight, post-1662 English coin, it would buy more gold as bullion in Paris and Amsterdam than the face value of that coin would say it was, measured by the gold in English guineas.
