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GEORGE III has recently been vindicated by Brett Hammond for the dearth of silver coinage in his reign (COIN NEWS, September 2012, pp. 4243.) During his long reign, shillings were only minted in eight different yearsfive of them during the last five years of his life. As Mr Hammond pointed out, the dearth of silver coins was mainly due to the inflated price of silver because of the wars with Spain, America and Napoleon. The first silver shilling of 1763, the so-called Northumberland Shilling, was struck at the instigation of the first Duke of Northumberland, Hugh Percy. Hugh Percy was born Hugh Smithson in 1714, grandson of Sir Hugh Smithson, 3rd Baronet, from whom he inherited the baronetcy in 1733. He changed his name to Percy when he married Elizabeth Seymour in 1740. She was Baroness Percy, an indirect heiress of the Percy family. The Earldom of Northumberland had been in the Percy family for several hundred years. Hugh Percy eventually inherited the title of Earl of Northumberland and was created the First Duke of Northumberland in 1766. He was also honoured with a knighthood (KG) in 1756 and was a Privy Counsellor in 1762. This same reverse had been used on the silver coins of George I, George II and George III for the past 73 years. There are two major varieties and several minor varieties known. The first die to be used for the 1787 issue did not have a sprinkling of hearts around the lion in the Brunswick-Lüneberg arms. This was later corrected to include the hearts around the rampant lion, however, neither type is more rare than the other. The legends on both sides of the coin should carry stops between each word but minor varieties are known that include no stop over the Kings head or no stops at all on the obverse (this last is the rarest of the varieties). Other known varieties include 1 over reversed 1 in the date and no stops at date. Various combinations of these are known on the proof coins. Only about 60 per cent of the coins were actually distributed at the time because as quickly as they reached the public they were melted down for their silver due to the rise in silver prices again. £55,280 worth were minted but because of the increase in the silver price, not all were put into circulation and in 1798 the Bank still had £22,800 worth of them left. The Northumberland shillings of 1763, portraying a young portrait of the King, were distributed in Ireland. An older likeness of George III first appeared on the 1787 shilling. The last date of shillings in the 18th century was 1798. This is the Dorrien-Magens shilling often erroneously called the Dorrien and Magens shilling. Magens Dorrien was born in 1761. In 1788 he married the Hon. Henrietta Cecilia Rice of the family of Lord Dyneover of Carmarthen. After his marriage, he changed his name to Magens Dorrien-Magens, presumably so that his name fitted better with the titled family into which he had married. He was apparently accepted by that family since he was elected as a Tory MP for Parliament in Carmarthen in May 1796. But he was unseated in November after an election petition. In 1804 he was elected as an MP for Ludgershall in Wiltshire. In 1812 he became Steward of the Manor in East Hendred in Oxfordshire. He was a successful banker at least from 1796 to 1842, but a relation may have founded the bank that incorporated his name since there was a bank from 1770 with the name Dorrien, Rucker and Carleton. In late 1797 the price of silver had fallen below the 62d per ounce that was necessary to make it viable to produce silver coinage. Early in 1798, Magens Dorrien-Magens appeared to have been the leader of a group of ten bankers who imported nearly 10,000lbs of silver to be used for shillings and sixpences. The Royal Mint began work on the shillings in April and by the beginning of May they promised the first batch of shillings to the banks by the middle of the month. However, wary of the problems that the fluctuating price of silver had caused in the past, the Privy Council Committee on Coins decided to stop the Mint from proceeding any further and Parliament eventually issued a stop order to the Mint in the middle of May. The number of shillings minted is unknown and the number surviving after the minted ones had been melted is also difficult to ascertain, but has been variously calculated at between 236 and 285. However, as of 1980 only 14 had been reported. At least one has since been soldby Goldberg Auctions in the USA for $27,600 on June 1, 2005. In the decade following the Dorrien-Magens fiasco, the public was struggling along with private tokens, countermarked Spanish 8 reales, foreign silver and copper pennies and twopences minted by Matthew Boulton in Soho, Birmingham. Despite the high price of silver and the war with France, the Privy Council Committee on Coins decided to go ahead with repairs to the dilapidated and dangerous state of the Tower of London that had been built by William I in the 11th century and which housed the present Mint. In the end they decided that it would be cheaper to construct a new building for the Mint on Tower Hill, a few hundred yards away. Modern machinery, including steam- powered presses, was also ordered and by 1811 297,666lbs of silver coin had been mintedbut not shillings. The Committee feared that the bad coin in circulation would be driven out by the new coins of the same denomination too quickly, leaving an even worse shortage. The issue was of Bank of England tokens in the denominations of 1s 6d and 3s. These issues continued to be minted through 1816 in considerable quantities, replacing the private tokens in 1814 and easing the transition to the well-known re-coinage. The Duke of Wellingtons older brother, the exuberant William Wellesley Pole, was appointed to the Master of the Mint in 1814 (see COIN NEWS, May 2014). He set about completely reorganising all aspects of the Mint. His young brother, the Duke, dutifully quashed Napoleons ego trip the next year and so it was time for a re-coinage. This was begun in July 1816 and in seven months 84,462,840 silver coins had been minted, with over 49 million of them as shillings. It took less than a month to distribute these coins throughout Britain. To avoid the silver coinage suffering the same fate as previously, their size was reduced, thereby lessening the silver content and making it less than a shillings worth. The diameter of the shilling was brought down from 25mm to 24mm and the weight was consequently 0.3g less than those of previous George III issues. Another 17 million shillings were produced between 1817 and 1820. From the 1816 issue there was a drastically new design. The image of George III with its newly couped bust was completely different from the earlier design and the new reverse carried a single shield of arms, omitting the French fleur-de-lys. However, it did retain the arms of Brunswick- Lüneberg, but at the centre of the shield. The new issue was engraved by Thomas Wyon Junior, the first of the talented Wyon family engravers, and later by Benedetto Pistrucci. Among these later issues there are a few known varieties, notably the 1817 which coin can be found with the reverse legend reading RRITT and anotherthe rarest of these varietieswith the R of GEOR: overstruck with an E. In 1818 the date was recut and on the second striking the final 8 was higher than the other figures. In 1819 the 9 of the date is sometimes clearly overstruck on 8 and there are also reports of others overstruck on a 6. Finally the 1820-dated shillings can be found with the I of HONI on the reverse clearly struck over an S.