This week’s fresh listings:
This page is to be updated every
Tuesday and will contain all the latest Coin,
Medal & Token listings for that particular week.
The more observant of you may have realised that I no
longer keep previous "Fresh Listings" coins on this page.
All for sale coins can be found via the category grid on the front
page. Most sold coins are now accessible via a new link on that same
category grid.
Additions to www.HistoryInCoins.com
for week commencing Tuesday 3rd December 2024
WI-9032: John (as Lord) Irish
Medieval Hammered Silver Halfpenny.
Listed in reference books as pennies but circulated at halfpence (the
halfpennies duly circulated as farthings).
Second DOM[inus] coinage
with obverse legend ending -OM, c.1185/1190 and no later than 1208/9. Waterford mint; Walter as
moneyer. With a cross potent as opposed to a cross
pommée
reverse, this is a Group 1b coin, Spink 6210.
Prince John (his father still being very much alive at this point) was
given Lordship of Ireland in 1177. He
finally visited in 1185 which coincided with the first (excessively rare)
issue. This later issue followed on from
that. In 1208, John became king, so
heralding the third "Rex" coinage.
Waterford is a rarer mint for this issue. 
£385
Provenance
Ex M.J. McKeever collection
WI-9033: Edward 1st Irish Medieval
Hammered Round FARTHING. Second
coinage, type 1, the rarer Waterford mint - only Dublin and Waterford struck farthings and only Dublin struck them for the late Edward
1st issue (the issue in between those two struck no farthings). Spink 6256. A rare coin. £195
WI-9034: Excellent Edward VI Irish Tudor Hammered Silver Groat or
Sixpence. Posthumous (Henry VIII) old
head coinage, 1547 - 1550. CIVI
TAS DVB LINIE - Dublin mint. Initial mark P. The final type IV issue
(small right facing bust; very much in the style of the English Tower groats) and so
nearer to 1550 in date. Spink 6488. Struck in the name of Henry VIII and with the
old head portrait of Henry VIII, even though by the time this coin hit the
streets of Ireland, Henry had been dead for nearly
three years. The reason for the old
king's details on the coinage was not, as most people understand, simply
because Edward was too young to do "kingly stuff", or because people
still loved the old king, or even that the Irish were slow off the mark - it
was actually done to con the people, or rather to carry on conning the people,
but conning them just a little bit more.
Actual Henry VIII base coinage, struck towards the end of his reign, was
very debased as a way of making money for the mint,
and therefore the country, after Henry had all but emptied the country's
coffers. The English ministers planned
to bring the currency of England (not Ireland!) back up to .925 alloy from little better than copper and indeed they did
this in 1551 with the English fine silver issues. To pay for this, the Irish debased coinage
would continue for a further x4 years after the death of Henry and crucially,
having the old king's name and portrait on the coins would, it was thought,
trick the public into accepting the poor coins.
Remember, the coin in your hand back then was supposed to be the face value
in silver, so much so that the coin itself was largely irrelevant - all you
needed was a penny's worth of scrap silver to purchase a penny loaf of
bread. These debased coins were far from
being worth their face value in metal.
The bit where the English ministers conned the people just a little bit
more was in making the silver content of the Edward VI coinage just a little
bit better than the worst of the Henry VIII coinage BUT they increasing the
face value from a groat (fourpence) to a sixpence WITHOUT
upping the metal content. Basically,
same coin but a revaluation. To further
rub salt into the wound, whilst in 1551 the English were enjoying bright shiny
fine silver coinage of .925 alloy, the Irish, in 1552,
having suffered in order to pay for the English fine silver halcyon days,
suffered further by having their coinage reduced even more to .250! So here we have a coin that is Henry VIII
and/or Edward VI and a denomination of 4d and/or 6d! More importantly, we have here an excellent
grade example with an unusually clear initial mark. Superior to the Spink
plate coin in terms of edge and legends. A rare offering. £665
Provenance
Ex Tim
Owen
WI-9035: Irish Charles 1st
Hammered Silver ORMONDE Groat. The Great Rebellion in Ireland.
Issued by the Lords Justices at Dublin and termed Ormond Money due to the
Earl of Ormonde being appointed Lieutenant of Ireland
in 1643. This issue demonstrated
allegiance to the monarch by incorporating the king’s crown on the
obverse. Issued
1643-1644. Large C•R; crown above; all within linear
and beaded border / Large IIII; D above; all within linear and beaded border.
Spink 6548.
This was the final coinage of the rebellion period to be issued. The crude fashion with which this coin has
been cut, together with the rudimentary die-sinking, and the indifferent
strike, is somewhat reminiscent of the Charles 1st besieged issue just across
the Irish
Sea in Carlisle a year or so later. £235
WSax-9036: Pedigreed Edward the
Confessor Hammered Silver Penny. Pointed helmet type, B.M.V. VII, circa 1053-6. +GODRIC ON LEHER - Leicester mint. Spink 1179. Only x2 examples recorded on the EMC
database; only one of which is GODRIC (same dies). An exceptionally rare type coin coupled with
a rare mint town. Old
tickets here and here. Better than VF and with an impressive
provenance portfolio dating back to over 100 years ago. £1,885
Provenance
Ex Stanley Gibbons
Ex Baldwins (2011 - sold for £1,250)
Ex E.W. Danson (2005)
Ex B.W.
Hunt (dispersed by Spink in 1955 for £3,10.0)
Ex Duke of
Argyll collection (dispersed by Spink in 1949)
Ex E.H.
Wheeler (dispersed by Seaby, 1931
Ex Major
P.W.C. Carlyon-Britton (dispersed Wheeler in 1918 for
£2.12.0)
WMH-9037: Edward V or Richard III
Hammered Silver Medieval Groat. Type
2a, reading EDWARD DI GRA REX ANGL Z FRANC.
London mint, initial mark Boar's Head 1
struck over Sun & Rose 1. Spink 2155. Obverse
dies in the name of Edward with an underlying Sun & Rose 1 initial
mark. In 1483, on 12th February, the
Cinquefoil coinage of Edward IV's type XXI ended. The new mint master, Bartholomew Reed,
entered into an indenture with the king and thus Sun & Rose 1 was
introduced. Edward died on the
9th April 1483
but Sun & Rose 1 continued through the very short reign of Edward V and
into the reign of Richard III. This
ended on 20th July when a new indenture was prepared by Robert Brackenbury to introduce the Boar's Head mark. The dies were prepared very soon after Richard
III ascended the throne on 26th June 1483.
Boar’s Head initial mark - the White Boar was the personal device or
badge of Richard III and dear to his heart.
Richard III was the last of the medieval monarchs, losing to Henry Tudor
on Bosworth
Field, or
as is now the current thinking, on a field a few short miles from that famous
location. The famous
"King in the Carpark."
Whist Richard was no saint (I think some poor decisions and a ruthless
streak that they all had at that time was about as bad as it got), he probably
wasn't a ‘child killer’, ‘murderer’, or ‘usurper’, at least no more than any
other medieval monarch. Don't believe
all that Shakespeare tells you!! So here
we have a coin struck from an obverse die that was very much part of the Holy
Grail of Edward V's coinage but modified by the addition of Richard III's beloved Boar’s Head initial mark, but crucially
leaving the old regnal name intact.
Coincraft place this coin under the Edward V category whilst Spink place
it under Richard III. Incidentally, as a
Richard III groat, it is the rarest type, other than the York example - the last one of those I
saw go through auction achieved £7,000 before
commission. An
extremely rare coin indeed. £3,875
WSC-9038: Scottish James III
Jacobite Touch-Piece which is Guaranteed Touched by
James. James Francis Edward
Stuart. Circa 1720's. This silver touchpiece would have been
personally touched by the would-be James VIII and given out to a sufferer of
Scrofula, or modern day tuberculosis.
This "Touching Ceremony" goes way back. It was basically the monarch of the day
saying that as God had put him on the throne, he (the monarch) was a conduit of
God, thereby when the monarch personally touched the touchpiece and gave it to
the sufferer, God himself had also touched it, thus a
rapid cure of Scrofula was all but certain.
Some cynics might claim that this was nothing more than a massive
self-promotion on the monarch's part?
However, it was hugely popular and near universally accepted as having
value throughout the land, even though I suspect the difference it made to
sufferers of TB was as close to nothing as you can get. James Francis Edward Stuart, ever keen to
promote his right by God to be monarch, would have been a fool to not perform
the Touching Ceremony, and indeed he embraced it for all he was worth whilst in
exile in Italy.
When the exiled King James VII and II died in 1701, his
son James Francis Edward Stuart took up the reins of the Jacobite cause.
He laid claim to the thrones of Scotland, England and Ireland as James VIII and
III. But to his opponents he was the ‘Pretender’. Smuggled out of England as a baby when his
father was deposed, James ‘VIII’ was raised in France. In 1708, supported
by the King of France, Louis XIV, James attempted to invade Scotland, but was unable to
land. James himself finally landed in Scotland in December 1715, but
he was not able to revive Jacobite fortunes and left for exile again with some
of his leading supporters. In 1719 another Jacobite rising, this time supported
by Spain, was defeated at the Battle of Glenshiel, in the Northwest Highlands. James remained in exile for the rest of his
life, dying in Rome in 1766. There he was
the head of a royal court, with queen and two heirs. His ‘reign’ as Pretender
to the throne had lasted just over 64 years.
Only ever
struck in silver, and made with holes already in place in order that recipients
should wear them on a chain around their necks, firmly touching the bare skin
at all times, these Jacobite touchpieces are considerably rarer than the
English gold examples - this being only the second example I have ever
had. See here for a
detailed write up of this touchpiece.
Although four or five orders were placed and received for James VIII
touchpieces, only x22 pieces are extant today.
This one is type Obv.1 / Rev.1 - see THE SOVEREIGN REMEDY by Noel Woolf, a thoroughly excellent book with much information on
touchpieces throughout the ages. A rare offering indeed. £1,850
Extra information / image added to this recent New Addition:
Malcolm IV
WSC-9014: Malcolm IV Scottish
Medieval Hammered Silver Penny. Front
facing bust of Malcolm, sceptre either side (the right sceptre more angled than
the left and not as clear), type IIa, Spink
5016. Obverse: [MA]LCO[LM
REX]; reverse: [HVGO ON ROCABVRG] - Hugo of Roxburgh. All types have Hugo as moneyer and all are out
of Roxburgh, although Berwick is a theoretical possibility as a further mint
town. The difficulty lies in only a
single digit total population with some of those being cut quarters and cut
halves. Further, all Malcolm IV coins
are poor (bar the one which is described below, and even that has a poor pair
of legends), resulting in no coins having full (or even remotely full) obverse
or reverse legends - these being pieced together using several different coins
from the extant population. Coincraft
sum that up nicely here. Type IIa (front
facing bust, cross fleury
with pellets - rarer still with the x4 accompanying stalks) is the rarest of
all Malcolm IV pennies although it goes without saying that all Malcolm IV
coins are excessively rare. I've been
looking to buy any type for the entire lifetime of this website (nearly 25
years now) as well as a good few years prior to that eventful day! This is the very first (and only) example
I've seen on the open market in all that time.
The National Museum of Scotland, which has a very impressive and
in-depth coin collection, has no Malcolm IV examples in their collection -
indeed, they gloss over the reign completely in their Sylloge (my edition is 1977)
by going from David 1st / Earl Henry straight to William the Lion. The Hunterian Museum of Glasgow, again possessing a very impressive and in-depth coin
collection, has no examples in the collection.
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which has a formidable Scottish coin
collection, has but a single (but remarkable!) example - a left facing portrait
(Spink 5019) - which is the very best known example of all Malcolm IV coins and
is illustrated on the excellent EMC database (EMC/SCBI NUMBER:1035.0014). Of the remaining five coins on the EMC
database, two are cut fractions whilst the other three are on a par with this
coin - one of those three has recently come up for sale for £15,000 - see image here. The Ashmolean example will not be the only
one of those coins to be permanently locked away into a national /
institutional collection. Even if that
is the only one locked away, it effectively leaves this coin as one of two or
three best known examples available on the open market, assuming the other one
or two ever come up for sale because as you know, coins of this desirability
and rarity invariably get sourced straight into major collections long before
they hit the open market. Most people,
when collecting Scottish coins by monarch, do as The National Museum of
Scotland does - pretend Malcolm IV doesn't exist. A rare opportunity to have
a coin in your collection that virtually nobody else will, or realistically can
have. £12,750
