Author: BNS Blog Coordinator

Medallic Art and Satire in the Glorious Revolution – Alexander Ryland

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. The downfall of James II was a source of ridicule, satirised in visual and material culture through the language of masculinity. One source of this satire can be found in the medallic art of the Glorious Revolution, where a mixture of Williamite propaganda and demand generated by a commercial market for satire resulted in James’s unmanly reputation being struck into the medallic record. The research in this note was kindly funded by a BNS Research Grant.

A Forgotten Coin Auction at Carlisle in 1870 – Hugh Pagan

Although auction sales of coin collections certainly took place in England outside London in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, the evidence for them is patchy. The present note records such a sale which took place in Carlisle in 1870. Unusually, a contemporary newspaper report of the sale both reports the results and names the buyers of the lots that contained coins ranging in date from Celtic times to the reign of William and Mary. The buyers involved included the London coin dealer Julius Jessop and the Yorkshire coin dealer W.H.Eggleston, from Dewsbury, and the latter turns out to have been the original employer and coin dealing partner of the better known dealer James Verity.

Facts concerning the Origin of the Troy Weight Standard – Robert Tye

A Troy pennyweight of 24 Troy grains historically derived from the half of an Islamic pre-existing bullion dirhem of 48 grains.  Developing that study of weight standards by a further study of coin weight, Skinner (1967) judged the derivation beyond doubt, after showing the early post reform Arabic dirhem “set the standard for the English Penny Sterling” (i.e. that the 22.5 grain sterling penny is intentionally a half of the 45 grain dirhem), which therefore “had a direct effect upon later English standards”.

Coin Tickets Revisited: The Value of Provenance – Chris Tyrimos

The provenance of a given coin, token or medal not only affects the market price, it has other functions. Perhaps more importantly tickets give us a hard copy trail that should be protected, in many cases a short hand to a pedigree, ideally but not always, a chronological trail. Often, even with the advent of tickets a complex international provenance which jumps centuries can be difficult to bridge, let alone without them.

An 1834 William IV Sixpence with a Laboratory Confirmed Multi-Strike Error from the Steam Press Era – A Ikraam

This research note presents a newly confirmed mint-stage striking anomaly on an 1834 William IV sixpence, authenticated through laboratory testing at Brunel University London and the University of Oxford. The coin displays severe deformation across both sides, including terraced doming, loss of the SIXPENCE legend, and evidence of repeated in-die striking. SEM–EDX and optical profilometry confirm that the distortion occurred during manufacture at the Royal Mint rather than through post-mint alteration or later damage. Mint errors of this severity are rarely recorded in William IV silver coinage, particularly from the early steam-press era. No equivalent example has been identified in Royal Mint documentation, British Museum catalogues, or major auction records, marking this specimen as a rare witness to early mechanised minting failure. The study demonstrates the value of integrating laboratory techniques with traditional numismatic analysis to distinguish genuine mint-stage anomalies from post-mint damage with high confidence.