MARSH TOKENS

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which a swindler's worthless paper becomes the best money the district ever had, and the swindler has to decide what to do about it.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

The genius of Glibb & Sons was never the swindle. Anybody can sell a man a share in a drainage scheme that will not drain. The genius was the terms, printed small at the foot, and they read — they still read, you may go and look, the prospectus is nailed up at Drudgeford — as follows:

In the event of dissatisfaction, the customer's money shall be refunded in full and without quibble, in marsh tokens.

And Glibb & Sons were as good as their word. That is the part everybody misses. Barnaby "Bargain" Glibb never once refused a refund in his life; he was famous for it; he would refund you cheerfully, immediately, in full, and hand you a fistful of small stamped tin discs with a reed on one side and GLIBB & SONS · REDEEMABLE on the other, and shake your hand, and wish you well.

The tokens are redeemable. They have always been redeemable. You may walk into the Glibb office any day of the week and redeem a marsh token, and you will receive — this is the whole of the trick, and it is perfect, and it has never been successfully complained of — another marsh token.

Spendable nowhere. Refundable always. It is on the prospectus. Nobody was lied to. Half the district got rich in tin and poor in everything else, and Glibb bought a house with a dry roof.

Now. Sodden Bottom had rather more marsh tokens than most, having believed rather more of the prospectus, and Sodden Bottom had, that winter, almost no coin at all — because the coin had gone into the drainage scheme, along with the district's optimism, and the drainage scheme had drained, as advertised, precisely nothing.

So there was a parish with a great deal of worthless tin and nothing to buy anything with, and it was in this condition that Tobit Beake, who kept the ale at the Stilt & Reed and was not a clever man but was an observant one, did the thing that changed the district.

He had a customer with no coin and a pocketful of tokens. And instead of the usual conversation, he found himself looking at the little tin disc on his own counter and thinking a thought that had, apparently, not occurred to a single soul in the whole realm in eleven years of Glibb's cheerful refunding, which was:

Well. I'd take one.

Not because it was worth anything. Because he knew Sary would take one off him for eggs, since Sary owed Podd for the thatch and Podd had been complaining for a month that nobody had any small money, and Podd would certainly take one, and if Podd would take one then so would half the green, and if half the green would take one—

He put the pint on the counter and took the token and said, "Go on then."

It went round the parish in a fortnight, the way things do on the net. Not by proclamation; there was no meeting; there is never a meeting. Somebody took a token for eggs because somebody else had taken one for ale, and by the end of the month the position at Sodden Bottom was that a marsh token was worth one token's worth of anything the parish had — which is not a definition an Exchequer man would accept, and is precisely how every currency in the history of the world has ever worked.

And here is what Sodden Bottom had, that winter, which it had not had in November: money.

Not wealth. Nobody was richer; there were exactly as many eggs and pints and thatched roofs as before. But the stuck-ness came unstuck. Podd could mend Sary's thatch in December and be paid before the eggs came in April. The Widow Cobb, who had nothing to sell but time, sat with children and was paid in tin, and bought bread with the tin from a man who wanted his ditch cleared, and paid a boy in tin to clear it. Eleven years of a parish being unable to trade with itself for want of small change ended in about six weeks, because a hundred and forty people had, without one of them putting it in words, agreed to believe the same thing at the same time.

That is money. That is all money has ever been. The tin was still tin. Glibb's promise was still worth precisely one further token. Nothing whatever had changed except that everybody now expected everybody else to take one — and the expectation was the value, and had been all along, sitting in every pocket in the parish for eleven years, waiting for one publican with no imagination and a great deal of common sense to go first.

Word reached Glibb in the spring.

He came out to look. He stood on the green at Sodden Bottom in his good coat and watched his own worthless tin buying bread, and buying labour, and settling a debt on a gate-post between two men who did not much like each other, and he did the arithmetic that any swindler would do, which is that there were something over four thousand marsh tokens loose in that district and every one of them was now, functionally, a claim on real goods — and that he had printed them, and could print more, and that the parish's belief was, in the most literal sense available, his to counterfeit.

He stood there a long time. Two hours, they say; long enough for somebody to bring him a chair, which he did not sit in.

Then he went back to the office at Drudgeford and did the only genuinely honest thing recorded of Barnaby "Bargain" Glibb in his whole life. He had the plates for the marsh tokens taken up, and he had them destroyed, in the yard, in front of two witnesses he paid to be there, and he had a notice printed and nailed to his own prospectus, which is still there under the first one and is much the shorter of the two:

No further marsh tokens will be struck by this house, in perpetuity.

Those in circulation are all there will ever be.

— B. Glibb.

Asked why, by one of the witnesses, on the walk back, he is recorded as saying only: "It's theirs now."

The district has never agreed on what that meant. Half of Drudgeford holds it was conscience — that a man who had cheated everybody he ever met got, at the end, one clean thing and knew it when he saw it. The other half, which contains all the tidy minds, points out that a currency nobody can print more of is a currency that holds its value, and that four thousand permanently scarce tokens in a district that believes in them made Barnaby Glibb, on paper, the richest man in the Drownings.

The Clerk's own view, for what it is worth, is that both are true, and that this is very much what people are like, and that it does not make the notice less good.

The tokens are still going. They have outlasted Glibb, and the drainage scheme, and two Exchequer attempts to have them suppressed as an irregularity — the second of which failed on the grounds, entered in the register with visible reluctance, that the tokens are not a promise of money and have never been represented as one, and the parish's willingness to accept them is not a matter into which this office may enquire.

You can spend one at Sodden Bottom today. You cannot spend it eleven miles away at Mucklecombe, where they will look at you politely and hand it back, because Mucklecombe never agreed and so it never became true there.

Money is not a thing you are given; it is a thing a parish agrees to. Glibb sold four thousand people a refund worth nothing — and they turned it into the best small change the Drownings ever had by the only means anything in this realm is ever made real, which is that enough people decided at once to act as though it already was.