Skit notes are items resembling banknotes but were never intended to be used as money. The most well-known of these is the “anti-hanging” note produced by George Cruikshank in 1818. Banknote catalogues usually have a separate section for these, often quite rare, pieces of printed ephemera.The recent acquisition of a skit note that is not catalogued, has prompted research into the life and career of its issuer. This, along with the discovery of two more unrecorded notes from the same issuer, but with different dates and addresses, suggests that several, and possibly many others are likely to have existed.
Author: BNS Blog Coordinator
Coins from the Mint at Bury St Edmunds – David Palmer
A recently introduced website which details the coins from the Bury mint is described in the attached note. …. or here to go directly to the Bury website
Bedfordshire Tokens, Tickets, Checks and Passes – Supplement 1- Gary Oddie
Publishing a book in late 2023 that could have had the title Bedfordshire Tokens – Everything that isn’t Seventeenth Century was always likely to lead to the discovery of new pieces. This note adds illustrations of a few pieces that were known at the time of writing, but had not been located for photography, along with the predicted new examples of tokens used by farmers and Market Gardeners along the Greensands Ridge.
Henry VI Restored: A New Legend for the Halfpenny – Lee Stone
A new variation of the kings’ name for Henry VI Restored halfpennies.
A Contemporary Forgery of a Henry V Groat – Josh Cattermole
An interesting contemporary forgery of a Henry V groat, with an examination of its material composition.
An Edward IV Dublin (?) penny with cinquefoils by neck – Oisín Mac Conamhna and James Mayer
As much as will lay upon a sixpence – Laura Burnett
We are probably all familiar with the use of modern coins as adhoc scale bars in photographs of objects. A phenomenon so widespread, and accepted, that it is found in scientific journals as well as hurried snaps. We are also familiar with the use of coins as weights, either reflecting their expected weights in societies where they circulated, or re-used as weights once they had gone out of use as coinage. However, when spending a fun lunch hour taking part in the Early Modern Recipes Online transcribeathon last November I was intrigued to come across coins being used as a way to measure a quantity of ingredients, not by weight, but by area….
Mints and Moneyers of Edward The Confessor’s Sovereign/Eagles Type – Hugh Pagan
Image credit: Noonans The primary purpose of this note is to provide an up-to-date list of the minting places and moneyers recorded for Edward the Confessor’s Sovereign/Eagles type, chronologically the seventh substantive type struck during Edward’s reign, most probably in the later 1050s.
A fifth Cork groat of the readeption of Henry VI – Oisín Mac Conamhna and Jack Pope
Very recently, one of us wrote about the four Irish groats then known from the second reign of Henry VI, all from Cork, in the political and numismatic context of the contemporary earldom of Desmond. Even more recently, the other of us has acquired a fifth newly-found specimen of this coinage. The purpose of this note is to record and describe this addition to the corpus.
A Christmas Shilling From Manchester, 2013 – Gary Oddie
This note presents a very recent shilling token issued for Manchester Christmas Market, 2013. Correspondence at the time with the designing artist and Manchester City Council revealed the story behind the token. The market is still going strong, unlike most of the web pages used only a decade ago – a useful reminder that modern tokens need recording before they are forgotten.
