Gresham's law the building of the Temple from the Bible and the Mishna in tractate Bava Metzia () from the Talmud. Ibn Taimiyyah (1263–1328) described the phenomenon as follows: In an influential theoretical article, Rolnick and Weber (1986) argued that bad money would drive good money to a premium, rather than driving it out of circulation. However, their research did not take into account the context in which Gresham had made his observation. Rolnick and Weber ignored the influence of legal tender legislation, which requires people to accept both good and bad money as if they were of equal value. They also
Gresham's law been noted much earlier, in the 14th century, by Nicole Oresme. In the year that Gresham was born, 1519, it was described by Nicolaus Copernicus in a treatise called "Monetae cudendae ratio": "bad (debased) coinage drives good (un-debased) coinage out of circulation." Copernicus was aware of the practice of exchanging bad coins for good ones and melting down the latter or sending them abroad, and he seems to have drawn up some notes on this subject while he was at Olsztyn in 1519. He made them the basis of a report which he presented to the Prussian Diet held in