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Cunningham adds his tribute of praise: 'The conceptions of national wealth and national power were ruling ideas in economic matters for several centuries, and Oresme appears to be the earliest of the economic writers by whom they were explicitly adopted as the very basis of his argument.... A large number of points of economic doctrine in regard to coinage are discussed with much judgment and clearness. Endemann alone is inclined to quarrel with the pre-eminence of Oresme; but on this question, he is in a minority of one.
The history of the Sire de Joinville makes it evident that Saint Louis was an admirer of this scheme of government, and the writings of Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, and of the famous Juvenal des Ursins, convince us that Charles V., who merited the surname of Wise, never thought his power to be superior to the laws and to his duty.
This remarkable development of opinion on this subject is practically the work of one man, Nicholas Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, whose treatise, De Origine, Natura, Jure et Mutationibus Monetarum, is the earliest example of a pure economic monograph in the modern sense.
Having drawn attention to the transition from the circulation of money, the value of which is recognised solely by weight, to the circulation of that which is accepted for its imprint or superscription, the author insists that the production of such an imprinted coinage is essentially a matter for the sovereign authority in the State. Oresme now comes to the central point of his thesis.
Roscher says that it contains 'a theory of money, elaborated in the fourteenth century, which remains perfectly correct to-day, under the test of the principles applied in the nineteenth century, and that with a brevity, a precision, a clarity, and a simplicity of language which is a striking proof of the superior genius of its author. According to Brants, 'the treatise of Oresme is one of the first to be devoted ex professo to an economic subject, and it expresses many ideas which are very just, more just than those which held the field for a long period after him, under the name of mercantilism, and more just than those which allowed of the reduction of money as if it were nothing more than a counter of exchange. 'Oresme's treatise on money, says Macleod, 'may be justly said to stand at the head of modern economic literature.
This last observation is of special interest in a fourteenth-century writer, as it shows that Gresham's Law, which is usually credited to a sixteenth-century English economist, was perfectly well understood in the Middle Ages. This brief account of the ground which Oresme covered, and the conclusions at which he arrived, will enable us to appreciate his importance.
'The scholastics, says Roscher, 'extended their inquiries from the economic point of view further than one is generally disposed to believe; although it is true that they often did so under a singular form.... We can, however, single out Oresme as the greatest scholastic economist for two reasons: on account of the exactitude and clarity of his ideas, and because he succeeded in freeing himself from the pseudo-theological systematisation of things in general, and from the pseudo-philosophical deduction in details.
It is true that Marsilius from Padua is an Italian writing for Ludwig the Bavarian, but the other writers who in the XIV century appear as forerunners of the liberal doctrines are not Italians: Occam and Wycliff are English; Oresme is French.
The Christian Exhortation, quoted by Janssen, says, 'The farmer must in all things be protected and encouraged, for all depend on his labour, from the monarch to the humblest of mankind, and his handiwork is in particular honourable and well pleasing to God. The division of occupations according to their dignity adopted by Nicholas Oresme is somewhat unusual.
The debasement of the coinage by the introduction of a cheaper alloy is condemned. In conclusion, Oresme insists that no alteration of any of the above kinds can be justified at the mere injunction of the prince; it must be accomplished per ipsam communitatem.
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