Definition
The right of coining money. In historical English law, this was the sovereign prerogative to mint currency — the exclusive authority vested in the Crown to produce lawful coin of the realm. As a royal prerogative, it could not be exercised by a subject without express grant or license from the sovereign, and any unauthorized coining constituted a serious criminal offense against the Crown.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical and constitutional sources treating royal prerogatives. Researchers encountering it in old English legal texts, state trials, or treatises on the prerogative should understand it as a component of the broader cluster of sovereign monetary powers — not merely an administrative function but a jealously guarded attribute of kingship. The term is Latin and will appear in its Latin form in original sources; English-language paraphrase, when it appears at all, varies across editions. The 2 How. State Tr. 118 citation in Black's anchors the term in the State Trials record, making that series a natural next stop for researchers seeking the term in applied legal argument. Because monetary sovereignty was contested in contexts involving franchises, chartered boroughs, and noble grants, the term may surface in disputes far removed from what a modern researcher would classify as "currency law." Researchers should also be alert to the related offense of coining without authority, which appears under the heading of counterfeiting but also under older categories of treason and misprision in pre-modern English law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among the shelf sources, defining the term briefly as "the right of coining money" with citation to 2 How. State Tr. 118. The entry is characteristically spare and does not situate the term within the broader prerogative framework or distinguish the sovereign's inherent right from any delegated or franchised form of that right. Historical legal usage, however, treated the jus cudende monete as one of the most fundamental of the regalia — the bundle of rights inseparable from sovereignty — alongside the right to administer justice, levy taxes, and make war. Bracton and later prerogative writers treated coinage as an attribute of sovereignty that could not be alienated in substance even if its exercise was sometimes licensed. Black's entry, while accurate as far as it goes, gives no indication of this constitutional depth. Researchers should not treat the brevity of the dictionary entry as a measure of the term's significance in historical sources.
Jurisdictional Note
This is a term of English constitutional and historical law with no direct modern analogue in American legal usage. In the United States, the coining power is a constitutional federal prerogative vested in Congress under Article I, Section 8, but that power is never described by this Latin phrase in American sources. The term is relevant to U.S. legal research only where colonial-era or early common-law sources import English prerogative doctrine.