Brendan Greeley

A dividend in silver form.

What they expected.

So this is an early form of joint stock company.

Friedrich Engels actually believed that this was the origin of the joint stock company.

These silver mines are just really expensive to get money out of the ground.

So Saxon investors would put together in this form.

And what they got out of this was a big silver coin.

It wasn't money.

It was a dividend.

It was a stamped pure form of silver.

So you have this exception where because the mine is illegal, what's coming out of it is big, high value silver coins.

No pennies, no little money, nothing, just big money.

So all of this work, by the way, I should credit Peter Vorl as a Trek historian who sort of pulled all of this out of the archives.

But what you then end up with is this exceptional circumstance where it's not that there was a lot of silver in the valley.

It was a big silver mine, but it wasn't wildly out of proportion with other silver mines in Europe.

It's that it was only producing big coins.

And it was so hell-bent on producing just the big dividend coins for Saxon silver investors that

The miners revolted, actually.

So they struck twice, and then they finally sacked the town.

And their chief complaint was that they weren't getting paid in the same quality money that was leaving for Saxony.