2 thoughts on “Henry Cotton, Dean of Lismore, Coin Collector – Hugh Pagan”
Hugh, if you need to see it, I have a copy of SNC May-June 1918, the Irish coins in it (catalogue numbers 62934 to 63182, are described as “chiefly from the Gillespie and Archdeacon Cotton collections” and span the period from Hiberno-Scandinavian issues to those of the second issue of James I. Individual provenances, to either Gillespie or Cotton, are not noted. There was no subsequent listing in SNC 1918 for post-James I Irish coins, from this or any other collections.
Peter. Many thanks indeed for this. The fact that in the NCirc listing the coins that had belonged to “Archdeacon Cotton” are not distinguished from those which had belonged to Gillespie probably accounts for the fact that in my old note I had not gone into any detail about the ex-Cotton coins. But the date-span of the coins listed in NCirc demonstrates that Cotton had made a wide-ranging collection of Irish coins, not limited to coins of post-1660 date.
One additional detail about Cotton’s annotations to his copy of Marshall that may be worth mentioning is that for nearly all the Marshall varieties of the later silver coins of George III and of the silver coins of George IV and William IV, he very neatly recorded, on the basis of published Mint reports, the actual number of pieces struck of the variety concerned, which can be taken as evidence of how serious a collector in this series he must have been.
BNS Research Blog 
Hugh, if you need to see it, I have a copy of SNC May-June 1918, the Irish coins in it (catalogue numbers 62934 to 63182, are described as “chiefly from the Gillespie and Archdeacon Cotton collections” and span the period from Hiberno-Scandinavian issues to those of the second issue of James I. Individual provenances, to either Gillespie or Cotton, are not noted. There was no subsequent listing in SNC 1918 for post-James I Irish coins, from this or any other collections.
Peter. Many thanks indeed for this. The fact that in the NCirc listing the coins that had belonged to “Archdeacon Cotton” are not distinguished from those which had belonged to Gillespie probably accounts for the fact that in my old note I had not gone into any detail about the ex-Cotton coins. But the date-span of the coins listed in NCirc demonstrates that Cotton had made a wide-ranging collection of Irish coins, not limited to coins of post-1660 date.
One additional detail about Cotton’s annotations to his copy of Marshall that may be worth mentioning is that for nearly all the Marshall varieties of the later silver coins of George III and of the silver coins of George IV and William IV, he very neatly recorded, on the basis of published Mint reports, the actual number of pieces struck of the variety concerned, which can be taken as evidence of how serious a collector in this series he must have been.