I got me a fascinating coin these days which led me to post it here as an example how
Roman antiquity worked its way into more modern times, and how ancient and new mingled.
Up until the 18th century, the English penny was a silver coin, though seldom minted; thus there was a shortage of small change leading to many privately issued tokens. Trying to relieve the shortage, and using state-of-the-art technology, the state made a treaty with Matthew Boulton, owner of the private Soho
mint in Birmingham, to produce 480 tons of pennies and 20 tons of twopences for 1797, at the whopping
weight of 1 oz. (28.35g) for the penny and 2 oz. (56.7g) for the twopence! Boulton
had the first steam-powered coin presses, constructed by
James Watt himself.
The
types were adopted directly from
Roman times, with the laureate and draped
bust of the monarch on one and
Britannia sitting on a rock on the other
side. Okay, it's not an emperor but a
king now, and Britannia's attributes have changed (from
standard and spear -
Mars - to trident and olive-branch for
Minerva and Neptune), but these are minor matters.
The huge copper coins were produced in the same quantities in 1798, but bearing the date 1797. So there were about 34,406,400 pennies and about 716,800 twopences struck. They were nicknamed "cartwheels", it's easy to see why. Even today, they aren't
rare; many survived being used as 1 or 2 oz.
weights in shops and kitchens. What I'd like to know (and maybe our British friends can tell us) is: Why do very most of these pieces have such BIG edge knocks? As far as I know, the metal isn't (harder) bronze but (softer) copper, but this can't be the whole explanation: what did people do with these coins? Did kids have games those days in which pennies were thrown against the wall, or something similar? I'd be very interested in a plausible explanation for this phenomenon. EF coins with nice edges do occur too, but are MUCH more expensive than the 10 Euros I paid for my twopence "double whopper".
Rupert