scottishmoney

Only a fool would spend something he paid more than 20 quid for for a mere 20 quid. What about a credit or debit card?

I am thinking that a portrait should be of a hystorical figger:

Nah, it is rather a more accurate representation of a then 83 year old monarch.

Good one HC

I stopped selling on eBay back in 2008 and haven't looked back. I don't know why someone would bother with it. As a buyer I tend to look for sellers that will deal off eBay so I can shave off an automatic 12% off the price.

To narrow down what the intended coin was you would have to get an accurate weight of the piece and find out what the BRM was striking at that time.

I think you will find we are a constitutional monarchy that pretends to be a democracy We have a constitution? The Magna Carta is about as close as your going to likely get.

Ah gash, you forgot hardheads, turners an' hatpieces.

It wasn't a theft, rather it was a "repatriation" of state property of the USSR.

I collect 17th century tokens myself.

I wonder if whence I have croaked and am pushing up weeds they will auction my hoard as "property of a gentleman" ?

Much better selling it through CWTS as opposed to eBay. I don't even look at eBay most of the time anymore. Here is where I look at CWT: http://www.civilwartokens.com/

The great thing about Civil War tokens is there is a lot of variety. You can even find them with warships, guns etc. I bought one a couple of years ago that is very rare and was dug up in a local church's vegetable garden where it was likely lost soon after it was circulated in 1863.

The only redeeming thing with cents in the USA is I can buy up bags and boxes of rolls at the bank and search through them and find old fogies like the 1874 and 1890 that I found last month. In the past few years I have found a couple of dozen cents that were older than 100 years old.

Five quid was a decent amount of dosh then. The design wasn't carried on to the smaller note, by then BoE decided to put HRH on the fiver - which really was a shame. British banks, particularly those in England had a tradition of sorts of NOT having a portrait or even cipher of the monarch on notes as a bit of a superstition - a couple of Scottish banks didn't follow such beliefs - and failed spectacularly - City of Glasgow bank was one in 1878 that had had small portraits of Queen Victoria on their notes. A similar pattern followed in British North America - the banks like Westmoreland Bank that had portraits of Queen Victoria bought the farm - the only exception to the rule was Bank of Toronto which kept portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on their notes into the late 1930s.

The Lion and Key is a classic English note: And a lovely Britannia:

For the paste 40+ years England has done a wonderful job of printing notes with references to non-political historical figures. I'd like to get this note sometime.

Can it be legally done in Britain? I have seen discussions on a Canadian forum where this subject has come up.

Good luck - if I saw it in front of me and could rotate the coin I might be able to determine the markers for the different types. Kind of looks like farmland find materiel that got chunked into a rotovator.

A bit like the Irish punt, was worth about 90p but you only ever got 1:1 if you spent an English pound over there. There was a brief stint ca. 1975-7 when the Irish currency was actually worth a bit more than a British quid. It was so unusual that it made the news in all rounds.

I could rather see it like the Scots pound of old, ie 12:1 - the Scots pound was a unit of account until the 1760s or so and was valued at 12 Scots to 1 British/English. When the Brent crude dries up the Scots pound will trade like toilet paper.

In these days bankers go on in their perfidious pursuits. In days of old they were in the very least run out of town, but much more likely were gaoled or even worse. I do believe that a few exceptional cases shall have earned the latter sentence - as an example. AIG, RBS, HBOS, Lehman Brothers - doesn't matter the ilk - but a wee bit of drawn blood might satiate the need for consequence.

http://news.yahoo.com/uk-39-osborne-rule-currency-union-independent-scotland-074618069--sector.html Canna have your cake an' eat it twa it seems. In the unlikely event that Scotland did opt for independence I could see some two decades down the road serious regrets ala the split up of Czechoslovakia. Now Czechs and Slovaks are pondering why the world they needed to split a country that was getting along just fine - no real ethnic tensions etc like Jugoslavia.

That's true for the US I'm sure, but the observations I've seen here are that they are not so good with UK coins. That's my perception too. I was referring to non-USA (world) coins in general between the two main USA TPGs. Almost without exception, when offered two coins of the same numeric grade from PCGS and NGC, I rarely prefer the PCGS example over the NGC example. I'm just talking numeric grade here, not either services ability to attribute varieties, etc. And, I'm also speaking with reference to not just UK coins, but also other European, Asian, African, and South American coins. Again, just my opinion based on my observations. Mileage may vary. With USA coins I view the opposite - USA coins in a higher grade tend to be better in PCGS holders than NGC. Quite frankly PCGS is a veritable virgin whence it comes to grading British or other "foreign" coins - they were rather late to the boat.