Tudors and Stuarts

This short note will revisit the shillings issued at the York mint during the civil war. The series has been comprehensively studied and published(1, 2).The dies were engraved by Nicholas Briot and the pieces were made using a roller or cylinder press. This results in a slight ovality and curved flan of some pieces and slight creasing of the metal when they were cut from the strip or subsequently straightened. Misalignment of the silver strip could also lead to coins with partial straight edges. Two pairs of rollers were manufactured, each with five dies engraved on their surface. Briot’s skill as an engraver means that it can be challenging to identify the exact die pair.  Many published illustrations make it difficult to distinguish between certain dies and errors have been found in some catalogues(3). The following pages will provide good illustrations of pieces made by every die pair and die combination. Whilst not original, it is hoped it will be useful.

A possible new type of Charles 1 ” Fine Work ” shilling has appeared in a recent auction and is assessed in this article.

Looking into the breakup of a threepenny piece die at the Aberystwyth mint in the reign of Charles I, and the relevance in the dating of die sequences.

Since the publication of ‘The Galata Guide to hammered and milled threepenny pieces 1551 – 1663’ in 2016 very few new dies for the coins have come to light. So when a new die is discovered it is worthy of note. Within the Elizabethan series of threepences there are a few that are notably rare, one such is the 1574 initial mark issue, so when a coin from a new pair of dies is discovered it became worthy of recording them as an adjunct to the Galata Guide. A coin purchased at the London coin fair earlier this year came from these new dies and was complemented by a purchase off EBay a month or so later with a second example of the reverse die. The following article records these new dies.

A note in vol.17 of the Numismatic Chronicle by John Brodribb Bergne (1800-1873), in which Bergne lists, together with their back histories,  the ten or eleven specimens known to him of the famous Oxford crown of 1644, with a view of the city of Oxford under the horse on the obverse, turns out to contain similar information to that in an earlier list of the same character contained in a letter dated 20 December 1805 written by the banker and coin collector Thomas Dimsdale (1758-1823). Dimsdale’s list is one of the earliest to list  coin by coin, together with their back histories, examples of a rarity in the early modern series, and is as such of some significance in the history of the methodology of British numismatics.

For many years it has been assumed there were only two examples of Briot’s First Hammered Issue shilling (S2862). The first known was the British Museum specimen bought in 1825 although no details of the purchase are known. The second dates back at least to the collection of Grant R Francis in around 1918 and it was recently sold as part of the Hulett collection. In 2010 an unrecognised example appeared in an Auction in USA and later, still unrecognised, in the trays of an American dealer at Coinex 2016 when it was bought by a collector who has since sold it to the author of this note. All three are die duplicates.

A recently discovered  Charles I threepence of the Dovey Furnace mint from a previously unrecorded obverse die and known reverse die. The coin having been over-struck on a flan previously struck as a sixpence also appearing to come from the Dovey Furnace mint.