A decent example of this Colonial Issue. It was originally intended for Ireland but they rejected it. It was then sent to what became the American Colonies. It’s dated 1723 and known as the second type.
I like these. Quite a story behind them, reads like a soap opera. The coiner, William Wood obtained the contract to mint the coins by paying off the King's mistress! They seem to have circulated pretty heavily in the colonies judging by the number found by metal detectorists.
It's ironic, the pieces made for Ireland weren't popular there but circulated in the American colonies, and the Rosa Americana pieces William Wood made weren't popular in the American colonies for which they were intended. In the end the whole endeavor didn't work out too well for him.
As noted above the Wood's Hibernia pieces were not popular in Ireland and thence they were sent over to those narsty fiends in N. America where again they were viewed as undervalued and several of the colonies, notably Massachusetts-Bay and New Jersey attempted to ban them. Massachusetts-Bay went so far as to introduce small change notes in the value of a penny, tuppence and threepence to drive the coins out of circulation. Here is one I have owned since I was a kid - paid way to much for it when I bought it. Lesson learnt. Inasmuch as Britain even treated it's own non-aristocratic commoners as unworthy of reliable coinage they treated their far flung possessions of Ireland and N. America as even more unworthy. In fact money and the issuance of money - particularly paper money was a sore spot with the authorities in London - which they believed was solely the prerogative of the crown. It explains why the colonists issued the silver coinage in the Massachusetts-Bay colony beginning in 1652 until 1682 with a frozen date of 1652 suggesting it was minted during the English Civil War. William Wood was also involved in a scheme to mint coinage for the American colonies, the reception of the coinage was similar to that of the Irish halfpenny debacle - failure. The example above is actually a circulated pattern coin I picked up at auction a few years ago - it is a pattern coin because of the fifteen pellets in the centre of the rose. These coins were struck in "bath" metal, a copper, tin and trace amount of silver.
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