What is the point with fourrée?

OK - here is a somewhat relevant story from the wild west - the wild West Yorkshire of the later 18th century that is.

As I recall accounts suggest that there was a deep trade depression going on and manufacturers were looking for government tax breaks and not getting them. So a sort of conspiracy took off to clip gold guineas. They were clipped roughly down to 15s 9d - that is - right up to the legend. The clippings were melted and struck into fake Portuguese moidores as I recall. Lots of people were getting a cut of this action, masterminded by a guy called "King David" out of Halifax. Although there were complaints from payees the only person really losing heavily was the local tax collector, who put out Dead or Alive reward posters on "King David". This David retaliated by putting up Dead or Alive reward posters on the tax collector - who was in fact shot dead. At that point the government itself stepped in.

Its hard to get exact details about the premiums being paid for good coin, and any discounting of bad coin - but primarily the clipped coins were going by count to most people except the tax man. He was having to take them by count, but getting paid by weight, and was loosing heavily it seems

Just a sort of illustration of how complicated these things could get

Miskimin and Velde were talking about medieval silver coins

Things got busy here just now, but maybe we could talk more about this down the line?

Rob T

 

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Could there not be a laser scan done on good condition fakes and see how close the measurements are to known originals of the same coin? I would think you could get it down to a high deg. of probability.

 

Random observation. A quick search for "AV test cut" at cngcoins.com brings up hundreds of results.