Medieval French Kings Hoard!

Today I walked into my coin shop to look for some ancients and instead found these.I have a lot of medieval French hammered coins but I found 5 kings I didn't have,including 3 Charles' and 2 Louis'.The store owner doesn't know much about these and had taken them in trade for some US coins so I managed to get all 5 on the cheap...

 

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Cool, your another king. "The King of Ancinet Coins."

B

 

what are they worth?

 

About $600 each.
Seriously,it's hard to say.You can find them ranging from $20-30 to over $100 for rarer examples.
These were less than $20 each but I think I did very well.

 

They look nice.

I assume that they have been dipped. I am asking what may be a stupid question because I simply don't know. Do scam artists make coins like this, or are the values too low to bother? Seems like pretty good prices for such old silver coins.

 

Very Nice Mikjo0hya:

 

As far as dipping goes,who can say what happened to them in the last 600 odd years? One can assume that somewhere down the centuries,they were cleaned in some way but it's almost impossible to tell.The standards for this sort of thing are different for ancient and medieval coins than they are for moderns.I would say that among these particular 5 coins,two or three have been cleaned in the last century and the others have been left alone for several hundred years.

 

Hello,
Very nice find Mikjo0, they are all very nice and quite good condition for this period.

Congratulations
Cucumbor

 

I would like to have some of those coins.

Do any of you guys have access to a spectrograph or some means to assay coins. I would think that one could tell a lot from metallic compositions. It would be fun to study the composition of alleged old coins. Are there any good scientific books on this? It would be almost like genetic studies for humans. There have to be metallurgical parameters for ancient coins from different global regions. I would assume that an ancient coin from China would not have the same composition as an ancient coin from England, etc.

 

My uncle (fathers side) actually has a mass-spectrometer in his garage. He picked it up from the Science Dept at Stephen F. Austin State University for a couple of hundred bucks. It simply had some blown fuses. This thing is huge too.

SFASU LumberJacks, (Class of 82)
Bone

 

QD,interesting you should ask about the composition because on original cardboard 2x2 for the Louis XII,the previous owner has written ".359 silver".The coin,as you can see,has the appearance of normal .900+ silver.
Anyone out there know if there was a debasement of silver French coins during this period?

 

If I recall, every gold or silver mine has its own unique characteristics, and the metal from them can be identified using one of those spectrometer things.

On a more macabre note, Swiss 20 franc gold coins from 1947 have six times the trace mercury content of previous issues, supposedly because so much of the gold used to mint them was ripped from the jaws of murdered Jews, where they had absorbed small quantites of the metal from amalgam fillings in other teeth.

 

The coin with 35.9% silver is obviously a man-made alloy, a mixture of silver and base metals. I'll bet that it has a lot of zinc in it. If the coin had a lot of copper, you would notice. Gold you would also see, and it would make no sense to use gold. I am guessing someone mixed up a cheap base metal alloy to fool potential buyers into thinking it was relatively pure silver. Who knows, maybe the French used to makes coins that way?

The Afghans, and I suppose others in that part of the world, made jewelry out of silver and various base metals. They talked about jewelry made from "seven metals". They also used a lot of lapis lazuli also. Spiritual stuff. The Afghan jewelry was relatively cheap because of the zinc, but it tends to corrode. I would be looking at the corrosion on that "silver" coin. Zinc oxidizes white, like a chain-link fence.

 

Thank you Doug,once again you come through with the answer to my obscure questions.
May I ask where you found this info...or would you have to kill me?..LOL

 

Interesting, as usual.

 

That Swiss - Jewish gold coin story is untrue.
It is an "urban legend" or myth and has been debunked many times.

 

I just did...Coin Talk Forum/Countries/France.....of course.But that being said,I looked around a bit at each website linked and darned if I could find a place that has silver content of the coins of this era.I could use some navigation tips.