Rob

It depends on what you want. As a general reference North is still ok. If you want specialised books, then you have to look at specifics such as The Coinage of Offa and his Contemporaries by Derek Chick; Coinage in Tenth Century England by Blunt, Stewart and Lyon; for specific mints, The Lincoln Mint by H R Mossop or The Ipswich Mint (3 vols.) by John Sadler; for Scandinavian copies then The Anglo-Scandinavian Coinage c.995-1020 by Brita Malmer is good. There are an increasingly large number of detailed volumes, but any volume encompassing all info for all reigns would be impractically large which is why North is still worthwhile as a good general guide, giving as it does the basics plus variety info. It's a bit dated now due to finds since 1992, but covers most of what is out there. If you want to find out how knowledge has developed down the years, then Ruding, Hawkins or Greuber together with papers from the Numismatic Chronicle and BNJ will all form part of the story.

Not if it is shilled. I've lost count of the number of second offers I have had on pricier (and cheaper) items. The number of people who it is claimed haven't paid when I have come second seems far in excess of the percentage of buyers who haven't paid me for items won.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-52843846

Could also have been withdrawn to relist them under a £1 listing fee offer. A 10% fee on anything listed for hundreds, suddenly becomes quite significant. £1 is not the end of the world.

I think we have all missed out on a withdrawn piece at some time on eBay, as it's something that has always happened and is quite frustrating. Having said that, the near complete absence of competitive bidding with items frequently selling for opening bids is a huge part of the problem. As nice as it might be to let the market find its own level, it is fair to say that the platform is too congested to give widespread exposure and hence generate interest in a particular item. If someone then makes an offer that is acceptable, the only issue is a moral one. You might test the water every so often by listing an item with a value higher than a £1 starting price, but if the result is a say £30 coin going for a quid every time, it isn't surprising that people take things down having received an offer. The alternative is to list things at a starting price you are willing to sell at. Then you have a guarantee of no competitive bidding, leading to perpetual re-listings because eventually someone will buy it if the price is within reason. If ebay had a facility to make a higher offer on items starting at a quid just as they do a lower one for a BIN, then there could be no complaints. The simple truth is that ebay has got too big and is unwieldy, satisfying virtually nobody.

I don't have anything more at the moment other than to say that Lloyd bought it in Spink 240 on 26th Sept 2016 for £620 hammer. As for prior to 1985, I suggest you might be on a hiding to nothing. York halfcrowns are too common to be extensively illustrated in old catalogues and even in good grade tended to be made up in bulk lots of 2-4 coins of the type until the last 30-40 years. Occasionally you get lucky, but even in this grade it's not a given. The only civil war halfcrowns that were routinely imaged were the W/SA and Chester issues. These two are more hit, whereas the other provincial mints are more miss. Unfortunately Besly's article is too late to be of use as it was written around the time when your provenance starts, so it won't be pushed back using a die pair description. It's a good coin and the same die pair as mine (2F) which is one of the scarcer combinations. I have 7 on the list including one with EBOR erased and one in the BM. Yours is an earlier strike than mine and possibly the best available. The flaw which develops below the horse's hoof through EBOR is barely a discolouration on yours. Whatever, for comparison see below.

Oh dear. Why do people bid on these things? You should be paid to take them away. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Hammered-coin-Unidentified-Thick-coin/124199957432?hash=item1ceae4f3b8:g:ZOYAAOSwWBVezBvw

A different era, but the same principle applies. This selection of Ns on a Soho pattern shows considerable variation in the state of the remains of a double cut N on what could not have been more than a few hundred strikes (also includes a recut N).

Yes, but things can get filled/degrade through use, so that in itself is not conclusive.

I don't know whether it is just a function of my screen, but this one looks to be the top of the right hand upright of an N because I can see a trace of a line in parts and a smaller raised spot corresponding to the bottom tip of the upright at a slightly lower and right position to that of the actual N. As the distance from top to bottom spot is the same length as the upright of the N, is this just coincidental?

Nothing with the wording 'could' is a policy. Rules need to be black and white, not a series of hedged bets at someone's convenience. If in doubt leave it out - just as the person trying to sell me a mortgage for a rental property said 'you don't have to tell them'. Yeh, ok, not.

You are allowed to start a new one called XXXX's worst offerings. Any banning of coin sales by ebay opens up an opportunity for someone else. If I read it correctly, the problem is with the payment processors. I can't see eBay being willing to give up a cash cow, which it must be given the number of listings, whether free to list or not. If an alternative appeared, one option would be a flat rate payment to list items for a given period of time, with money back in part for a sale and the ability to do buyer/seller payments directly which would allow all parties to get on with life. Plus the amount of crap would be seriously reduced. Elimination of this is impossible, but can be restricted by an up front fee. If you had to pay say a flat 5% fee with a minimum value to the platform for hosting the listing, so charged 10% up front with half refunded when sold, it would encourage desirable things to be listed, whilst restricting the rare 1971 pennies. Sure it would reduce the number of dire rarities available, but the quality of life would improve immensely.

It's conceivable that all were responsible. Simon is known to have been employed in 1649 as chief engraver, so having been promoted to that position I can envisage Simon being required to and producing a new design in fairly quick time to allow the rapid entry of the Commonwealth currency into circulation. What is less likely is that he was regularly employed in engraving currency dies. It's fair to say that the simplicity of the design would mean that any engraver with a few rudimentary skills could produce either die, and the quality of some dies where the legend is left wanting in both alignment and spelling suggests it was a person of relatively lower skill that was responsible. The question therefore is whether documentary evidence occurs to swing the evidence one way or the other. but given his primary role was the production of seals which obviously required a much higher level of skill than the currency dies, I would think that the vast majority of dies were cut by the under-engravers.

There are a few rust spots on the die, which is what I presume you can see to the right of Britannia. The S after BRITAN is ink. The reverse has a number of ink marks, two lines of which read BASING HOUSE which given it is written normally, the best assumption I can make is that it was due to the coin being under a piece of paper which was porous enough to allow the ink to pass through. Other ink marks appear on the obverse. Sam... is above the head and there are parallel lines by GI and something else (C?) by the ties. Basing House was a mansion that was besieged by Parliament three times in the Civil War, the final successful attempt at its capture came in the siege of August-October 1645. There's a Wiki page here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basing_House If the above is true, it therefore seems likely that this coin was once in the possession of someone doing research or writing an article about the siege, but no numismatic paper springs to mind.

I was thinking both die prep lines and a wipe. e.g. between the date and the crown are a few lines that would be nearly impossible to produce with a wipe, but with the lines on the neck the converse would apply. i.e. it's much easier to produce such a broad section of parallel lines on the coin than to do so on the incuse die detail. Any parallel marks are almost certain to have been done at the same time, so you would somehow have to maintain a constant pressure over a wide area whilst getting into the different angled parts such as the truncation to produce these continuous parallel lines. Not conclusive, but very iffy IMO. A good test would be to compare with other examples. After all, you have a coin with a low mintage, most of which are in decent grade, so this should be enough to find others with a similar pattern if on the die. A 66 is not critical as a 65, 64 or even a 63 should be ok to see lines on the die. As long as the surfaces are good, this should be doable.

This is a crazy small world - what number? We used to stay at the Southern Hotel which was number 15 or 16 I think (can't remember which as it was 50 years ago) for a week every year. It was run by a Mr & Mrs Turner. Crazy golf course opposite the front door and a path down to the wooded chine which ran up the hill to the right.

Holes in fences help.

That should be ok. It's the depth that counts. The longer the entrance, the less chance of hooking a leg round the corner. Use offcuts - that's what the wife did.

Apparently the key to a good house is a small entrance, with sufficient distance to the back such that nothing can claw them out. An interior dogleg is good because cats and foxes will struggle to get round the corner. Grand Designs has nothing on us. Same goes for a feeding station when they first appear. We made one out of a cracked storage box with the bottom of a tall thin flower pot cut off to restrict the entrance. Much amusement when the cat forced its head and one leg through but the rest wouldn't fit, so it skulked off back home on three legs with the tube securely fixed around its midriff. It doesn't try to gain access any more for some reason.

Correct. Since the hedgehogs returned three years ago we haven't seen more than the occasional slug. Just need to retrain them to get rid of the cats.

Good to see his id highrating_lowprice is accurate re-description and coin value - or should it be lowrating_highprice re the coin and asking price?

There's a lot of money sloshing around at the moment. Even furloughed people are getting 80% of wages with nothing to spend it on, including petrol/travel to work which must account for a major spend in most houses. Coupled with an interest rate that's effectively zero, and people are looking for places to park their money, whether researched or not. The down side is the difficulty in getting stock at prices which leave you a margin because online auctions are booming in the current climate, so sometime soon we need to move onto some form of mobility.

I'd say it was based on the deformation of the bottom of the 2 in the angle area, with the marked widening on the side of the character directly above the angle where you can see two lighter spots where it reaches the field which would correspond to the sides of the 1. You have two options. Either fill the 1 on the die, or polish it out.

Yes, it must have been struck at least twice, because the stop after GRATIA can be seen under the T upright. The other strike(s) might have been out of collar given the position of the detail around IUS which best approximates to somewhere in the tie area. And in daylight it is 1797, not 1792.

It's the underlying 8 reales detail. The original was dated 1792 and the wavy line is the base of the cuirasse. 1794 attached for comparison.