For this he
was accused of sedition, which charge he answered thus:

'Thus they burdened me even with sedition. And wot ye what? I chanced in
my last sermon to speak a merry word of a new shilling, to refresh my
auditory, how I was like to put away my new shilling for an old groat. I
was therein noted to speak seditiously. ... I have now gotten one more
fellowe, a companion of sedition; and wot you who is my fellowe? Esay
(Isaiah) the prophet. I spake but of a little prettie shilling; but he
speaketh to Jerusalem after another sort, and was so bold as to meddle
with their coynes. 'Thou proud, thou haughty city of Jerusalem.
_Argentum tuum versum est in scoriam_;' thy silver is turned into what?
into testious _scoriam_, into dross,' Ah! seditious wretch! what had he
to do with the mint? Why should he not have left that matter to some
masters of policy to reprove? Thy silver is dross; it is not fine; it is
counterfeit; thy silver is turned; thou hadst no silver. What pertained
that to Esay? Marry, he replied a piece of diversity in that policy; he
threateneth God's vengeance for it.

'He went to the root of the matter, which was covetousness, which became
him to reprove; or else that it tended to the hurt of poore people; for
the naughtiness of the silver was the occasion of dearth of all things
in the realm. He imputeth it to them as a crime. He may be called a
master of sedition indeed. Was not this a seditious fellowe, to tell
them this even to their faces?'

The three-farthing piece struck in Elizabeth's reign is often mentioned
in the poets. Shakspeare has an allusion to it in King John. He
introduces the bastard Falconbridge, ridiculing the personal appearance
of his legitimate elder brother, having just before compared him to a
half-faced groat:

'Because he hath an half face, like my father,
With that half face would he have all my land.'

Farther on, he says he would not have such a person (body):

'My face so thin,
That in mine ear I durst not stick a rose,
Lest men should say, Look where three farthings goes;'

alluding to the rose which was on both the obverse and reverse of the
coin. Beaumont and Fletcher, in the 'Scornful Lady,' show the difference
between the penny and three-farthing piece, and inform us of a knavish
trick then practised, to impose upon ignorant people the lesser as the
greater coin. Lovelass, speaking of Morecraft, the usurer, says: 'He had
a bastard, his own