Junk Box "Treasures": Trajan Dupondius, Romanus IV follis, Edward III (?) Canterbury Penny

Yesterday I stopped by my local dealer and poked through his junk boxes. Found a couple of ancients I thought I'd share. I passed on a couple of LRB AE2s that were pretty much unreadable.

Trajan dupondius (in the $2.00 bin) and a follis of Romanus IV (SB 1866) which put me back $4.00. The Romanus is an upgrade for me - this one is overstruck on a Class C follis (maybe). The Trajan will probably be impossible to fully identify, but I plan on having fun trying:



This wasn't in the junk box, but at $8.95 I couldn't pass it up - the flip said Edward III, but I am not sure of that - any guidance would be much appreciated. The portrait is pretty cruddy, but I really like the reverse - my first Canterbury mint. It is possible it is plated, but with a loupe, the stuff on Edward's face appears to be encrustation rather than broken plating (can you plate a coin this thin?).



Here's the whole lot - a 1776 Mexico 2 reales and 1761 fake Spanish 2 reales, both worn slick. The Netherlands 2-1/2 gulden crown is out of scope for this forum, but I was pretty happy to find it cheap as it is the key date, 1940. These didn't seem to circulate much - the Dutch had a very bad year in 1940 and I'm guessing the Germans cut short production, or melted down a bunch of them:



Any new junk out there? Please share.

 

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kool group of inexpensive coins ...and i bet you had fun purchasing them..

 

Nice I like all of them, $2 for a 1900 year old coin with a little bit of detail looks like this would be a good place to start your identification of the Trajan...https://www.cngcoins.com/Coin.aspx?CoinID=341484

 

Thanks for the tip - you have a good eye, Ancient Aussie. I think this is a match to mine because I just did an OCRE search and found only one dupondius matching what little can be seen of mine:

Obverse: includes the legend OPTIMO (my lousy photos don't show this, but it is visible in hand)

Reverse: standing figure with cornucopiae

If I'm interpreting this right, RIC 674 appears to be the only match for these two items. Here is my OCRE search - it pulled up 8 hits, but the OPTIMO on the obverse is only on RIC 674 (the other 7 have OPTIMO on the reverse).

http://numismatics.org/ocre/results...ND+fulltext:standing+AND+fulltext:cornucopiae

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I did have fun! The local guy has interesting junk bins, price $12 to $0.50. I was in a bit of a hurry, so I didn't spend as much time as I'd liked. Maybe next time.

 

9 bucks for that English penny was a solid deal, I'm quite certain that the obverse is just encrusted, looks like rust to me. You may need to try a few techniques but it would likely clean up rather well.

 

With my limited experience on Dutch modern coinage, this 1940 2.5 Gulden ("Rijksdaalder") is in medium condition, and would not yield much above its silver value.

 

My (very) old Krause Standard Catalog puts most 2.5 gulden dates for this issue at $7 fine; the 1940 lists for $30 despite having a higher mintage than some (1939 for instance, which is at $7.00). Not a major rarity, but it seems to be the scarcest date (not counting "deep hair lines" variations).

My interest in that date has to do with the World War II German invasion and my suspicion that the issue was suppressed or recalled - there are probably Dutch sources for this possibility, but I don't know any Dutch (despite my great-grandparents immigrating from Amsterdam in 1882).

Except for banging around in a junk bin, it's not in bad shape:

 

I see I have one also, and paid a bit high for it. Looks kind of cleaned or whizzed, doesn't it? On the obverse anyhow. Love the big Dutch silver coins.

 

Nice grabs for a few bucks - how could you really go wrong?

 

A lot of Dutch crowns got cleaned - but otherwise yours is quite nice. For the most part, the 1940 dates do tend to go for more money than the other ones of the series. For a couple years I was watching them on eBay and the 1940 date did not come up much, and when it did the bidding was pretty aggressive.