Found while metal detecting, this William 3rd shilling which probably dates to the late 1690s has been inscribed with decoration and letters on one side only. It appears to read F Hirp or F Hire which might be someone's name. A friend suggested that it might be some sort of convict or love token. The decoration looks almost bell or ship keel shaped. Any ideas?
Fascinating find! Yes, love token, though I wouldn't say convict token unless you're Down Under. The decoration does look vaguely bell shaped, or vaguely axe head shaped, was my thought, but I don't think it's necessarily either of those things. More likely just a shape of some kind. Of what, is a fun mystery.
True, but I would imagine some older host coins like a Wm3 shilling could still have been used in the Australian convict transportation era. Here in America one tends to forget that people were sentenced to transportation here. I recall reading such a story in Ken Follett's A Place Called Freedom.
Very true. I had always considered that the coin would have been contemporary with any associated transportation, but maybe not.
The coin is so worn that it could have been used as an Australian convict token, but I don't think it is. Pretty crude for a love token too. Really no guess as to what it actually is. Bruce
I see FHIPP (or F HIPP) and quickly found family history of the Hipp surname. https://www.houseofnames.com/hipp-family-crest It's fun to speculate. Where did you find it? Seems pretty crude for a love token although maybe that's a wedding bell? I see it more as "I was here, and I'm bored", and perhaps on a ship (ship's bell).
I found it on the outskirts of Bath, Somerset. Thanks for your comments. Normally, the love tokens I find are basically very worn William 3rd sixpences that have been bent into an S shape. This the only one I've found with some sort of inscription.
William III coins are more common from the latter part of the 17th century because all hammered coinage was called in for re-coinage beginning in 1695 to standardise coinage. In fact branch mints were set up in several locales in England to facilitate the re-coinage. As a result of many coins being minted then they circulated deep into the 18th and very early 19th centuries. So it could have been carved up even early in the 19th century - obviously it was heavily circulated when it was done. Above is a 1696 half-crown that I purchased out of a junk silver lot that came into a coin shop in a lot of mostly early 20th century silver coinage - I paid the whopping sum of £4 - then at melt for it.
I hadn't really considered the potentially very long period of time that such coins might have remained in circulation and that my coin could have been inscribed much later than I thought. I have found a few nice William 3rd coins including a 5 string harp Exeter shilling.
A friend of mine found a William III shilling in a park here. Our coastal Georgia town was laid out in 1773, so the coin predated the town by three generations. He found several 1600s Spanish coins as well. Being so near Florida (the Georgia-Florida line used to be the boundary between British and Spanish empires), our local detectorists find a good bit of Spanish colonial coinage here.
It's surprising just how far some coins travel in their lifetimes. On a local farm here in Somerset, I have found a silver coin of Louis 14th of France and 3 Venetian Soldinos. One of our metal detecting club members found a Lord Baltimore Maryland penny in an area called Pill, near Bristol. He sold it at auction for several thousand pounds.
