Picked this up on monday. Henry II Class 1b hammered silver Short Cross penny, grading aVF or better (struck well but with the usual prevailance of flat patches which is normal for the issue) Obv; HENRICVS REX Rev; GOCELM ON WINC (Gocelm of Winchester) The Short Cross penny was introduced in 1180 (and this specimen dates from around that initial period) and they were struck continuously through to 1247. Although the portrait was modified and altered (often to a much lower standard) the series ran through an amazing 8 classes with many subclasses, based mostly on portrait changes and letter types. The coins were introduced by Henry II to replace the somewhat awful Tealby penny which suffered from extremely poor craftsmanship and the issue ran through Richard I (1189-1199), John (1199-1216) and into the first half of Henry III's reign (1216-1272). The legend continued to read HENRICVS REX (King Henry) throughout the whole period of issue despite having two king's with different names. The one other remarkable innovation with the S/C penny was that it broke from tradition. From Anglo-Saxon days it had been general practice to mint coins of a certain design and let them circulate usually for about 4 or 5 years and then another different design would be introduced, the old designs would be recalled and melted down. As far as i can tell the inference is that the old coins would be demonetised, the whole point of this continous changing coinage exercise was to keep the coinage to a high standard (because long serieses tended to become degraded and debased, as Roman coinage had). To increase the idea of stability though they decided to abandon this policy though and issue a coinage that would remain unchanged for nearly 70 years... as it turned out the coinage remained of a decent silver content but the workmanship fell victim to the degredation process that earlier generations had attempted to avoid with the rotational coinage. In 1247 the issue of clipping coins had become much more marked and in an attempt to curb these clippers and shearers the cross was extended to the outside edges ogf the coin and thus was born the Long Cross Penny.
Congratulations. Those "old coins" are more fascinating to me than "modern" coins. No matter how many coins of the same type you look at they all show differences in details.
That's the beauty of hammered coins, no two are the same. Plus the history these things could tell. Well the one above probably spent alot of time in a chest, probably underground with a couple of hundred others so it probably couldn't tell you quite that much.
Nice to see a well centered, good portrait and full legend coin from this reign, as you note they are usually in remarkably poor condition nowadays because of *abuse* contemporaneously on the part of the clippers etc.
