Next Club Meeting Monday
2nd October
·
Latin American Mining Tokens By Gerry Buddle.
Monday 6th November.
Monday 4th December.
·
Winter Bourse and
Member's Evening
Meetings are held
at the Abbey Baptist Church, Abbey Square, commencing at 7.00 p.m.
Future Events
It may seem early
but please note the Christmas dinner will be on the 9th December,
details to follow.
September Meeting
Reading Coin Club
welcomed Brian Arthur to give a talk on the Great Recoinage
of William III. He gave a short history
of the end of James II reign and the invitation by Parliament to William and
Mary to accede to the English throne. He also gave a background to the recoinage, reporting on the terrible state of what little
coinage there was at the time, often filed or clipped and generally very worn.
It had been estimated that only half of the coinage that should have been in
circulation actually was, the rest having been exported as bullion, turned into
plate or used in trade by the East India Company.
Finally in 1695 William
and Parliament were persuaded to pass “An Act to Remedy the Ill State of the
Coin”. This act allowed clipped coins to be used at full face value for the
payment of taxes and probably led to a lot of coins being given one last clip
before being paid in. Around the country the weight of silver returned was
roughly about half what it should have been in face value, the worst recorded
case being in Oxford, where what should have been 400 ounces only weighed 116!
It was also possible, for a time, to use some officially ‘pierced’ coins to be
used at face value, if the legends were deemed suitably full and free from
excessive clipping. However, not all piercings were official. All of this was
costing the government a great deal of money, mostly in the payment of taxes,
where the collected face value should have been £4.7 million whereas it was
actually only £2.5 million in silver.
In the meantime,
the Mint was busy producing the new milled coins as quickly as possible but not
quickly enough and the race meant that standards sometimes dropped. Eventually
five additional branch mints were set up around the Country. Coins from these
mints are identified by a mintmark beneath the King’s bust. Crowns were only
struck in London, other denominations were struck and
distributed from the provincial mints. The dies for use at the provincial mints
sometimes arrived in rusty condition and had to be repolished
and perhaps slightly altered at each branch mint. None of the provincial mints
produced coins dated 1698, presumably because they were still using the dies
dated 1697.
Under Isaac Newton
at the Tower mint, new records were being set for coin production with £100,000
per week a European record. In total between £6.3 million face value were
produced between 1696 and 1697 rising to £6.8 million in 1698. It appears that
unspent dies from various of the provincial mints
could be moved around, where the mintmark would be altered by overstriking before use at the new mint. The larger pieces
(crown and halfcrown) were produced with lettered
edges to make counterfeiting much more difficult and clipping and filing much more
detectable.
Brian gave a
rigorous exposition of all the varieties in this series and explained that many
of them came about because of mistakes made by the semi-literate workers,
others were due to expediency when, for example, new dies were urgently needed
after Mary died. He gave examples of many of the different types of harps (and
number of strings) used as part of the reverse design of the coins and also the
proliferation of different size shields that were used. Brian’s researches have
led him to believe that the small shields on the reverses of William's halfcrowns came first, before the slightly larger 'intermediate', and later 'large' shields. He gave an insight
into the internal politics at work in the provincial mints, sometimes leading
to duels! Other mint employees were even sent to prison for theft. Certainly,
some of the lack of quality can be blamed on the way that employees were paid
by piece work.
Parliament realised the size of the loss the recoinage
would incur and introduced the infamous ‘window tax’ to help pay for it in1696.
This only raised £1.2 million a year, as people bricked up windows rather than
pay the tax, examples of which can be found even to this day. Ironically, as a
main reason for the great recoinage was to combat forgery,
it actually led to new forgeries coming about. Even worse, the relative value
of gold to silver was higher in England than on the Continent and so coin could
be shipped out, melted down, sold for gold and then the gold brought back to
Britain and used to buy more silver than the original face value back in
Britain. Despite this, coins of William III survived and even formed part of
the repayment of Second World War loans to America, which were funded in part
by melting down our own silver coinage.
Our thanks go to
Brian for a fascinating and well researched talk.
(Pictures Courtesy of Mick Martin)
Subscriptions
Be reminded that
subscriptions are now due. It would be most appreciated if members yet to renew
their subscription would please do so at the next meeting. Please see our
treasurer Peter Hall. Membership cards are now available for paid-up members.
Future Events
·
Baldwins Coin Auctions 10,
Charles II St., - 20-22nd September
·
COINEX, Grosvenor
Square, London – 22-23rd September
·
Birmingham Coin Fair - National Motorcycle museum – 8th
October
Past Events
Club
Secretary.