Rob

I have emailed him twice. The first time telling him it was a pewter replica. The 2nd time asking him why he hadn't added this to the listing. Reported to ebay who do diddly. I reported it this morning too! He's a 'top' seller with a lot of feedback, bet they ignore it! What really annoyed me about this one was the blatant 'what is it'? You mean he couldn't actually read ELIZABETH on the edge of the coin and, putting two and two together (ie the date), realise it probably isn't Elizabeth II? And another! 170906386505 please do add link please! Link is here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/170906386505?ru=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fsch%2Fi.html%3F_from%3DR40%26_nkw%3D170906386505%26_rdc%3D1 Also reported by me. I cannot believe the earlier one went for £84 and this one is at £30+!!!! WTF are people who clearly know nothing doing bidding on replicas? There should be the equivalent of a driving test or you need to have your IQ checked before joining ebay. Seriously, I don't know whether I feel more annoyed at the sellers ripping people off or that these numpties deserve to get their fingers burned for being taken in. OK, because I'm nice it's obviously the former, but people need to learn before they spend. If I had a couple of ebay accounts to burn I'd relist using the seller's photos and a blistering description showing these things aren't worth more than the couple of ££ they cost at most museums and stately homes. It's now been removed. He even emailed me to say it was tested as silver. Knowing the name of the person who tested it might help too.

i havnt got a clue what you just wrote,havnt heard of nicholson but if it helps will put a pic of full reverse on.thanks for input Basil Nicholson had the most comprehensive collection of halfpennies in recent times, sold via Colin Cooke in 2004. This link goes to the William III section and 122 is the 1699 stop after date. Your coin is not from the same reverse die, but the picture is too dark and the pitting makes it very difficult to say for certain what is in the exergue. A different die doesn't exclude a stop after the date, but the condition of the coin raises questions as to whether any apparent stops are genuine or artefacts arising from corrosion.

Does it match Nicholson 122? i.e. is it from the same reverse die? The image is too dark to tell and it would help if the whole reverse was present.

The second coin I believe was probably struck at Worcester in Jan-Feb 1644/5, while the first was probably struck a few months later after New Year 1645, maybe in late June or July, but also at Worcester.

That is the crucial bit. The only person you have to please is yourself. A 1p coin can give as much pleasure as a £1m coin because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Things can get even more bizarre. First up is a 2d obverse with a 4d reverse. Followed by a 3d obverse with a 2d reverse!

Quarters were only made in 1718 & 1762 for currency plus the 1764 pattern which is also too early. 1790 & 1803 half guineas on their way. Sorry. That should have been 1790 1/2 and 1803 1/3 guineas. Didn't matter though because I couldn't attach them to the email via your contact link in the profile.

Quarters were only made in 1718 & 1762 for currency plus the 1764 pattern which is also too early. 1790 & 1803 half guineas on their way.

Individually all dies are right for a particular moment in time, but people make mistakes. The 1711 3rd bust shilling is the rarest Anne shilling. The 4th bust 1711 is the commonest. Just as engravers pick up the wrong letter and punch it in, so mint workers pick up the wrong die and strike coins until the mistake is noticed. Mules are more common amongst patterns. A good example of this is the large number of impossible die combinations produced by W J Taylor in the 1800s after he acquired the old Soho Mint dies in 1848. Yes, you might pick up an undated 20p in your change.

Mules are where an obverse and reverse die have been paired that don't belong together. The most recent example of this is the undated 20p where the old 20p obverse die was paired with the new 20p reverse to give a coin without a date. If the old reverse had been paired with the new obverse, you would have had a date on both sides. Most mules are a little more subtle than this. So for example, the third issue Queen Anne shilling dated 1711 is a mule because the 4th issue shilling was introduced in 1710. There are quite a few throughout the coinage, but most are rare and you would be unlikely to encounter them. The easiest way to get a mule is an undated 20p (but don't pay more than £30ish).

Die crack

Lighten up Rob.Even my 78 year old mother had tears of laughter....and she is proper posh. I did find the one about the delivered item being upside down amusing, but still can't comprehend that anyone would bother making a print of a TV presenter. I know TV personalities are full of themselves, but the cost of production must be outweighed by the public's indifference towards them. I always remember as a child, being in Bristol shopping centre with my parents when one of the local TV presenters came up and said hello and started rabbiting on about something. My parents looked at him blankly. It would have been about 1970, and we didn't have a TV at the time. Clearly famous in his own lunchtime.

He's a small time radio & tv presenter. His brother is a much better known presenter & talk show host: Jonathan Ross (or Woss ) Ah, I recognise the latter as a cue to turn over or turn off. My TV's on button doesn't work very well, though the off button is in good working order.

I don't get it. Who is Paul Ross? Clearly making inane comments is a booming industry, but they fall a bit flat when they have to be explained to the ignorant. Is he linked to Debbie's original pen comments?

The last index was produced in 1999. This lists the contents under the headings as follows. Generalities, Ancients, Mediaeval & Modern, Artefacts, Metals & Other Materials, Coin & Medal Production, Finds and Hoards. The book runs to 50 pages, so is obviously impractical to list here. For early coinage you would be better off with the Numismatic Journal.

I don't think it is that much of a leap to say this. In fact this is the point I am making. I also think it likely that a batch of plate would be completely coined soon after it came into the mint. Levies would be greatest when the largest bodies of troops were present, which would obviously want paying. I don't think there would be that many unused blanks left lying around, rather they would coin the blanks that had been made on the spot with unprocessed plate being retained separately. The list of articles states a pair of tongs and a hammer for rounding, suggesting the flans were rounded individually. That would result in greater irregularity as it would be necessary to hold the flan in the tongs while hammering the edge. This would not be as stable as a stack of clamped flans.

The three listed are on a par with the advert - as relevant and serious (not) as the product blurb.

That's complete and utter garbage. Why should any pen be particularly appropriate for women? Marketing people get too tied up in their own drivel. Reminds me of the Sky advert which says 'believe in better'. I do - that's why I haven't bothered with a Murdoch mouthpiece.

A full list of seized items as quoted by Besly the BNJ is as follows. It is reasonable to assume that this is a full set of tools required for mint operations, though Besly notes the absence of a balance and weights. The usual method of coin production from plate would be to melt the plate, assay it, refine as required, cast into ingots which were hammered into plate of the correct thickness. Blanks would then be cut out and rounded in a stack with a hammer before annealing to soften them prior to striking. The finished coins would be pickled in an acidic solution to blanche the surface. This was a fairly universal method of production. The unrounded coins should therefore provide evidence of an individual's hand based on the style of cutting and additionally may possibly be an indicator of a very busy period at the mint. The receipt book A entries for October to December 1643 give a total of about £2715 of plate with a couple of weeks where there were high amounts received. Payments in coin were particularly high from the end of November through to the end of December 1643 when nearly £2000 in coin was paid out. The main military activity in the West Country in this month appears to have been a renewed assault on Plymouth by the besieging Royalists. All of this can be further muddied by the degree of uncertainty surrounding the actual location of where the undated coins were struck. The currently accepted placements are Truro for the A1 crown and all subsequent issues at Exeter. However, the A and B crown obverses use a T shaped comma in the legend stops. Obverse C is B recut, when the T part of the stop is overcut with a conventional pellet. The question has been asked before and must be asked again and again until a firm location can be established, whether the T stop was a privy mark identifying the mint location as Truro. As the 1644 dated pieces were definitely struck at Exeter, the undated pieces can be assigned to the first 6 months of operations here, possibly extended by a short window at the end of the Truro period when the B2 coins may have been struck.

These are the lines I was thinking along. An individual has idiosyncracies which are difficult to disguise. In this case it is the difference between two workers, one of whom makes a couple of cuts down two sides, whilst the other is more methodical in trying to approximate to a circle. The second action would undoubtedly take longer to perform and would be consistent with a person who was conscientiously a perfectionist. The other wants to get the job done. This would obviously only apply to distinct features and not to a small arbitrary cut, but the flans with 6 or more flats are deliberate, and would imply a particular individual was involved.

The catalogue appeared before your post was made, as had the email from Baldwins announcing the sale along with the Bentley sovereigns pt.2.

If you look at the images in Besly's article in the 1992 BNJ, the illustrations used for the early halfcrowns show similar shapes for obverse H and to a lesser extent E. J14s whicha re the commonest Exter halfcrown are often seen with a square flan. The half unites both have a series of straight edges as do the first shilling, threepence and penny. Clearly a sample size of one is inadequate to make a broad statement, but there are sufficient examples of polygonal flans for the idea to be worth pursuing.

This idea might have some merit, so I will have a look later on. We know that punches existed at York to cut out a circle as the coinage is usually found without any flats except where the sheet was incorrectly positioned and the dies passed over the edge. These coins are usually centred on one side only with the other being slightly off-centre as a result of the dies not being in perfect alignment. In the case of Truro and Exeter coinage, it would appear from the coins which are frequently double struck that traditional methods were employed, but the use of a rocker press is not excluded as there are coins with a characteristic bow. The list of equipment seized in June 1646 gives 6 pairs of shears for clipping, 4 large and 2 small, so we know that the flans were trimmed at some point using shears. There is also a pair of tongs and a hammer for rounding listed. There is also 'one iron plate for nayling' (annealing) which would make the shears easier to use. The later undated crowns (C3-C7a) appear to be mostly round with only the following square examples in my images - C3 (4, 1 clipped), C6 (1), C7 (4) and C7a (1). There are a couple of hexagonal pieces too. The C7s account for nearly half the images I have of this type, but square flans as a percentage of the total C3-C7a (approx. 70) is no more than 15%. The 1644 dated crowns (C8-15) only have one or two at most that are square for any given type which equates to less than 10% (sample size approx.100), the rest are nominally round, as are most of the 1645 pieces. This would date the angular pieces to earlier in the period, or in very busy periods. It is possible the nine items listed as iron rings could be cutters which would be used up to the end of operations. This could explain the improvement over time in shape. So many questions without answers.

I think that the above picture is a reasonably comprehensive selection of the available pieces for research. The only image missing from my list of coins is that of the BM which was accessed in 1915. That would suggest most flans were adjusted. There is no way the coins with 6 to 8 faces in the bottom half of the image have not been modified. The picture is less clear cut on the top half, but a couple of straight lines on each coin does imply some human interference. If they weren't clipped in any way, the alternative would be that the shape was formed when the flans were stacked, clamped and beaten. This would definitely date each general shape, as replication would be virtually impossible.

Repetitive tasks get hard wired into the brain, so you can almost do them in your sleep your handwriting will be different to mine, even though we are both using the same tools (pens) and producing the same object (words) from the same base resource (letters) IF you were the only man doing the repetitive task, even if he were, he could'nt replicate exactly 100 times what he did the 1st time, surely? I think there may have been more people trimming the flans than hammering the coins on the grounds it would take more than a couple seconds to trim a coin whereas a coin could be struck in minimal time if many blows were not required. However, if only a small percentage needed adjustment, then all bets would be off.