Despite the essentially discretionary nature of criminal justice in early modern England, historians accept that mitigation was rarely extended to heinous crimes - crimes which were 'taken to constitute ipso facto a challenge to the established political, religious or social order' - and that a distinction was made 'between those offences which merited the full rigours of the law, and the rest'. Treason - including counterfeiting and clipping - naturally belonged to the former category. In practice, however, attitudes to coining were more ambivalent, and, like forgery, its criminalization 'reveals less a single fault line between classes than a fractured surface of doubts, confusion and deceit'. One finds not just that official rhetoric was tempered by a pragmatism intended to make the law workable, but that, conversely, under certain circumstances ordinary people were prepared to uphold the law exactly as authority prescribed. Responses to coining, therefore, challenge some of the major interpretative paradigms associated with the history of crime, and offer a revealing commentary on the development of the state and the popular legal consciousness which helped to sustain its legitimacy. This chapter takes as its starting point the vagaries of official and popular opinion, before moving on to examine the social contexts of communication within which those opinions may have converged at key historical moments.