Hey everyone, I recently picked this colonial up. Yes... it's pretty worn down but still nice to have. The reason why I am posting this is because I know some of these have different varieties or special things going on with them... but I don't have any books or anything on them. Anyone care to help? It's probably just another worn down one, but you never know?!
Ryan - The quantity of St. Patrick varieties is unbelievably expansive. Just recently I was conducting some due-diligence on a few specimens I was thinking about acquiring - spent hours trying to perform diagnostics and attributions.... I knew the specimens were authentic but couldn't specifically attribute them. There have been multiple Colonial Newsletters written on the topic. Breen also wrote a whitepaper on the topic. Notre Dame has seven pages of jpegs devoted to some common varieties. I know it at face value it probably doesn't seem like much help, but take a look at the footnotes on Notre Dame's site... http://www.coins.nd.edu/ColCoin/ColCoinIntros/StPat.intro.html. That's where I repeatedly found myself.
It is one of the so called "farthings" with the "quiescat plebs" legend. The larger halfpenny reads "ecce grex". Although it seems to be generally accepted that both size coins passed as halfpennies. The book on these has not yet come to fruition, there are a mind boggling number of varieties, most of which are rarity 7 or so!
