I am taking a hiatus from expensive coins for the next year or two so that I can finish up my education, then I can have some fun , but I do satisfy my craving for coins with these little $10 ones from time to time. My inspiration for wanting to get an English coin of Charles II was that my family were colonial gentry at the time of his reign and I thought that it would be cool to possess a coin that they could have touched. Here are the fascinating details of what the Cookes were up to in the 1600's http://wgscroggins.kueber.us/Cook5_William_1613.pdf As for the man on the money, Well, I'll let the BBC take it over from here.. Feel free to post your Charles II coins or genealogy stuff.
Nice coin M.M. and good write-up (as usual). I don't have (but I would like to get) a coin of Charles II. I do (however) have a coin (or two) of his father, Charles I. Charles I. Silver Penny 1631-32 London Tower Mint '98 Spink 2857 Note: Charles II was on the throne when England introduced the 'milled' coins in 1663.
Fun! I like it. Fun video, too. Speaking of cheap Chuckies, here are two off my old Holey Coin Vest. 1676 penny (correction - twopence - thank you, @Topcat7) 1662 crown As to Charles the First, here's a silver penny, ca. 1641-43. And here's the field in Little Bromley, Essex, where I dug it up in November of 2013, on my detecting week in the UK.
That’s fascinating, Lord Marc! Finding an ancient (relatively speaking) coin in the ground like that is a dream come true for anyone who is interested in history and archeology. It doesn’t get any better than that! How long did you remain on that spot and stare at the dirt caked coin in your hand. You probably lost all track of time—LOL
Indeed, indeed! It is an incomparable rush. A 1730s George II farthing turned up for me further back in that same field, and another digger found a tiny silver penny like I did (his was an Elizabeth I). We were visiting that field because as I recall being told, it had been the hotspot for several Celtic gold stater finds made by club members in earlier seasons! Somebody in the group found one the day after I left, though I don't know if it was in this field or not.
The closest experience I’ve had to that was in my own backyard. Actually my experience was really nothing like yours but I'll tell you about it anyway. The vacant lot behind my house was excavated for a new house and nine human skeletons were dug up by earth moving machines. Needless to say the work stopped immediately. Between the police homicide division, the city historian, and an anthropologist from the university—the land was determined to be an unrecorded slave burial ground dating from the 1850s. Most of the remains were relocated and the new house was built. There are still bones on the property however because every time there is a heavy rainstorm they continue to appear. My church conducted a prayer service on the site several years ago to honor the unfortunate people who died while in slavery and were buried there.
@Magnus Maximus I think I can date your Groat to between 1670 to 1684. (Ref: '98 Spink 3384) This would make it (one of) the earliest 'milled' coins of England. The four 'C's would indicate the value as four pence, three 'C's at three pence, two 'C's at two pence, and one 'C' at a penny.
That is equally fascinating, actually, if in a rather poignant way, and there are many overgrown slave cemeteries around here. I'm glad your church prayed over those folks. It's strange to think about, and I know we are veering dangerously off-topic (with apologies to @Magnus Maximus and Charles II), but I like to think that while you prayed for the souls of those long-departed slaves who led such a difficult life while they were here on earth, maybe they were looking down on you from above, and appreciated the gesture, and maybe they feel for us now, since we are the earthbound souls and they have ascended to the higher plane. All far astray from our topic, of course, but I think about these sort of things a lot, and archaeology (including old coins, of course) is fascinating because of the human element to it. What was the life of those forgotten slaves like? Who dropped my Charles I penny in that potato field in Little Bromley, Essex? Who spent @Magnus Maximus' Charles II groat, and what did it buy during its long time in circulation? No doubt it saw some dark taverns and bustling town markets in its day. This sort of stuff always fascinates me, even though it takes a lot of imagination to fill the wide gaps between the few facts we know. A little historical mystery (even if unsolvable) is fun, and I've had a healthy (if overactive) imagination since I was a child. I guess you could say I've never fully outgrown my child-like sense of wonder.
@lordmarcovan Based on the 'C' rule I would say that your Charles II 'Penny' is actually a 'Twopence' (Ref: '98 Spink 3388.)
Thank you. That coin, like 98% of my pre-2013 collection, went away in "The Great Purge" when I started my present collection, so I did not have it in hand and had mislabeled the filename "1d" instead of "2d".
Just s slight correction here. Milled coins were issued prior to Charles II in England. Some were issued under Cromwell just prior to Charles II's restoration, though these are scarce. More interestingly they were issued for a while under Elizabeth I almost a hundred years earlier and occasionally during the reigns of James I and Charles I. Understandably there was considerable opposition to the new mechanisation from the craftsmen moneyers and so these earlier milled runs came to a premature end. I am told one Frenchman, a specialist in milled coinage, found himself in the Tower of London on trumped up charges as a way of bringing his experiment to an end! I have a picture of my Eliz I milled sixpence somewhere, but I can' lay my hands on it at the moment.
Would that have been Eloy Mestrelle, perchance? I only remember that because several years ago I won a quiz by naming him, over on Collectors Universe. The prize (kindly donated by someone from Northeast Numismatics) was, as I recall, a slabbed 1800 Maundy penny in low Mint State grade (ANACS or NGC, I think it was). Very kind gesture on their part, and made me not only remember NEN with goodwill, but who Eloy Mestrelle was! This holed "touch piece" Elizabeth I 1572(?) halfgroat I had on my old Holey Coin Vest (seen in my avatar) was the only Elizabethan coin I've had so far, and it's "portrait-less", as many in this grade are. To date, I've not had a nice one ... yet. I shall have to work on that soon.
I often think about that when I collect coins, could the real Magnus Maximus have touched or have seen my avatar coin? Could my ancestor William Cooke Sr, have used this groat to buy him a pint of beer? One can imagine, right!
A few years ago I had experience of someone handling a coin which they knew their ancestor had handled. I found a 17th century token - I have forgotten the exact details but it was from a female undertaker's establishment (Mortician(?) to you Americans) in Coventry I believe. It dated to around 1665. It was bought on Ebay by a lady who had been tracing her family tree and this undertaker was a direct ancestor of hers! I was delighted it was going to such a good home. There would only have been a few hundred of these made, and all would have passed through the shop before going into general circulation. I also always found it reassuring that in the 17th century it was quite normal for a lady to own and run her own business in England. It seems we went backwards from there and it was well into the 20th century before that became the norm once more.
Neat story. I've had several "small world" moments with love tokens. But speaking of those 17th century English tokens, I once bought a small lot of about a half a dozen of those (from @Aethelred), for around four or five dollars each. I hoped they would fetch near $20 or so apiece on eBay. All but one of them did indeed close in the $18-22 price range. The one exception languished all week at auction in the $7-ish range, with relatively few bids. Let's say it was at $7.23 all week- something like that. I happened to be watching around the closing time of the auction, so I kept refreshing the page to see what would happen at the very end, in those last sniper-prone seconds... ... ten seconds left ... $7.23. ... five seconds left... $7.23. ... two seconds left... $7.23. ... AUCTION CLOSED ... $467.38. Woohoo!!! WOW! What just happened?!? I forget the exact amounts, now. It was something like that. Over four hundred dollars. I nearly fell out of my chair, then got up and danced a silly little jig that the Monty Python lads would've been proud of. In the last second or two, two different snipers had gone to war over the token, resulting in that (relatively) stratospheric closing price. It turned out that there were only perhaps five or six examples of that particular token known, and three were in museums. The winning bidder was in the same town in England where the token had been originally issued. Speaking of Charles II, when I shipped the token to the winner, I also included the holey Charles II halfgroat you see in Post #5 above, as a bonus gift for the winner. (And @Aethelred got thrown a crumb or two as well.)
Yes - I have been on the positive end of some of those sniper wars. (As well as some negative ones too!) One I recall was an Indian 8 Anna - the large octagonal one - which I had found in a job lot of foreign coinage. I knew it was fairly scarce so I had listed it at £9.99 and with seconds to run it was still there with only one bidder. It closed at £247.xx. As the whole box had only cost me £80 and other coins had more than covered that already, I was dancing the Monty Python jig as well! The deal that really got me going on the foreign job lots was a box I bought for £50. It was early days so I checked everything thoroughly and was delighted when I found a Portuguese 1 Escudo dated 1926 which Krause valued at $25. I was even more delighted when the box threw up 3 more of these. I listed the first one on Ebay with a 99p start. It finished a week later at £212. The other 3 all made similar sums over the next few weeks, and now I had a battle fund for coin dealing!
Ah, yes! "Job lots", indeed! I can see you've shared some joyful experiences. I once got a lot loaded with things like several Red UNC 1950 and '51 Brit pennies, plus some KN-mintmarked George V ones, and much, much more. The Vickies were as high as XF. It was plainly a discerning collector's lot that had ended up with my North Carolina dealer, who couldn't have cared less about that "foreign" material. The whole lot of around 400 coins cost me $40 US (ten cents per coin). Total Krause value at the time (circa 1992) was about $1,280 US. That right there was what made me a World Coin guy, though I'd had inclinations in that direction long before that.
