So many people were having a tough time that the british government came up with a bunch of laws to establish guidelines for helping the poor out. The monasteries used to be the ones who would care for the poor, but since King Henry VIII got rid of most of them, the people had nowhere to turn to now.

     This era saw a lot of banks being started by governments. Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany and Holland all started banks to help their currencies become more powerful and legitimate in trades. Banks were charging, and getting, huge interest charges, and the british government finally put their foot down and capped interest rates at 8%.

     In Holland, the Dutch people were going crazy over tulips! New colors and varieties of the flowers caused a gigantic run-up in the prices that people were paying. Some folks got into risky deals in trading the flowers and their bulbs. Just like the dot-com fall, all of this came crashing down after a while, with prices sinking to mere pennies of what they once were.

     Meanwhile, back in England, some goldsmiths that were in business found that, since people were asking them to store valuables in their safes and since they were dealing in a lot of coinage from other countries, they were actually becoming mini-banks. This came in handy during a brief period of civil war that England went through from 1642 to 1652. These goldsmiths decided that that was a very good thing for them to do, financially-speaking, and they grew their businesses to become small private banks.

     Across the ocean in America, people had begun arriving and building towns and cities. A lot of trading went on between the pilgrims and the indians, and tobacco and wampum (a type of sea shell) became the unofficial currency in the Virginia and Massachusetts colonies.

Did You Know?

Wampum was used as a currency in some spots in America for over 200 years!