scottishmoney

I currently have about 50K cents, only 6K of British pennies though.

I should see if I could scrap say a few kilogrammes of £SD pennies mostly QEII sometime here and see if they will take them.

Can you imagine the nerves of steel you would need to drive such a piece around all the time? Just today I nearly was clobbered by a elderly lady driving through a stop light.

Das ist gut hier: Now that is an auto I would love to be driven around in.

People did not care about the token issues like the halfpennies and pennies, they really only cared about the composition of the gold and silver coins. Nowadays we don't care one way or another, because it is all a nearly worthless token coinage.

I have to suggest that indeed it does have to deal with a great expansion of the economy and more disposable income that necessitated more coinage. There are parallels in the USA during the time, when the large cents of 1793-1857 were minted they were never minted in quantities in more than 3-4 million per year, but that seemed to be sufficient for the times, but then when the small sized cents were minted beginning in 1857 they were minted in much larger quantities that were often 10 times the previous large cent size mintages. The early Victorian era saw an expansion of consumer spending on a scale not seen before, while it pales in comparison to today, then it was much more than say the Georgian era. Remember this was the era of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Britain and the United States were seeing their economies expanding on an unprecedented scale, the result was that much more coinage was necessitated.

Nicholas Holmes in the History of Small Change in Scotland cites surveys from the 1840s in the north of England that testify to the circulation of significant numbers of the 1797 dated coinage even 40 years after it was first issued. Fewer numbers of 1806/7 coins were found, and then the next coppers in circulation were the GIV and WIV pieces.

The auction houses camera

I see red flags fluttering.

Without having my English hammered at hand I wondered on the groat part too. But I like the toning on it, it is old. By Mary's time the fine .925 had taken root, actually back during the reign of Edward VI. It was HVIII that was called "old coppernose" for a reason.

The quid coins take a beating, and look the worse for it. But really I have found decent coins in change, well in Europe - but British coins all the while.

Yes indeed, it is Queen Mary(1553-1558) a tanner or sixpence - which accounts for why it was bent - they were referred to contemporarily as "benders" because they could be bent easily. There was a tradition then of giving a sixpence to your intended and if she kept it she was yours, otherwise she bent it and cast it away. Some poor bloke could have gotten the diss with this piece. Love the renaissance era lettering on the piece, very decourative and not quite as utilitarian as QEI's coins got later in the 16th century.

The scratch takes it down several notches in grading. That coin now is worth about a quid with the scratch.

The coin appears from the images to grade VG-8. Usually those early cents in the early 19th century had mintage ranges in the 2-3 million range which doesn't appear to be huge, but was for the time. The 1817 dated coins are fairly common, but there are a couple of varieties, one has 15 stars on the obverse(face) of the coin and is worth considerably more.

It is a nice piece, a bit out of my area of expertise though. I myself am interested in the Graf Zeppelin medals, especially the gold from that era.

Smells like Cornish tin to me.

With the Moroccan and most other Arabic dated coins in Hejira dating - you can just add 621 to the date to come up with the date in Christian years. The one exception I can think of are Persian/Iranian dates which flipped back and forth and are a complete PITA to try to figure out.

Morocco.

I look at eBay occasionally, but admittedly it has been almost a year since I bought anything.