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ERRORS AT THE ENGLISH 17^th CENTURY MINT

by Guy de la Bédoyère

TRUE ERRORS

From the day dies started being manufactured to produce milled coinage in England, mistakes were made. Since dies were obviously reversed (a mirror image of the coin to be struck), and created by impressing letters and motifs using puncheons, it was easy to get confused. There are numerous instances but what happened most commonly is that incorrect letters were then over-stamped with the right ones. The deleted letters can often be seen on the coins. Curiously under James II (1685-88) this happened least often. Under Charles II it was not unusual, but under William and Mary and then William III on his own there were many more.

WHEN IS AN ERROR NOT AN ERROR?

A true error is where the wrong letter was placed on the die, or the right letter went in upside down. Sometimes letters were obscured or partly obscured on the die by dirt or damage. The dirt filled in the die at that point, with the result that the letter did not appear properly on the coin. This is quite common, and especially so on the coins of William III when there was so much pressure on the mint to churn out coinage. These are NOT die errors, since they simply involved poor striking of the correct letters. Particularly susceptible is the letter A where the cross-bar of the A is so thin it was easily filled with dirt, leading to the impression that the die-cutters used an inverted V.

That these As are not inverted Vs is self-evident from the formation of the feet of the A. The picture shows GVL from the beginning of William’s name (GVLIELMVS) and the GRA from the end of the legend. At first sight that A might look like a V because the cross-line is not visible. But now look at the way the feet of the A differ from the top of the V. The feet of letters usually have those conspicuous indents. If this was an inverted V then the feet would be flat. They aren’t so it’s obviously an A and not an error at all.

It is on the legends on the coins of William and Mary or William III on his own that some of the most conspicuous errors occurred. Today it seems almost incredible that coinage, a matter of great royal prestige, could have been issued with blundered legends. Naturally such items command higher prices today than correct pieces.

The following coins show six different examples of errors under Charles II, William and Mary, and William III.

1. THE 1673 ‘B over R’ ERROR IN BR

BR – normal B/R in BR – 1673 error

In 1673 some crowns of Charles II were issued with an error on the reverse involving the abbreviation BR for Britannia. The R was put in where the B was supposed to go. Since the letters are fairly similar it was easy to place the B over the R and cover up the mistake. However, the lower right stroke of the R protrudes from the bottom right of the B as is obvious from the comparison pictures shown here. The error has only been noticed recently, and indeed I’d had my own example (shown here) for a year or more before I noticed. The Spink catalogue lists the type at £200 in Fine.

2. THE 1677 RFX ‘E over F’ ERROR in REX

This previously unrecorded variety appears on the reverse of some 1677 crowns of Charles II. So far as I know, I am the only person to have observed this. The illustration shows in the upper half the correct form of the letters E and F. Note the indentation in the bottom of the F’s vertical stroke, which is more pronounced than in the E. The die engraver has stamped the letters RFX where he meant to stamp REX. The error was noticed and corrected by over-stamping the F either with an E or with just the lower horizontal. That this is a corrected error is clear from the obviously protruding right-hand half of the F’s foot, clearly visible here.

3. THE 1691 ‘I over E’ ERROR

The picture shows the GVLIELMVS (‘William’) part of the legend on a 1691 crown of William and Mary, rotated here by 90 degrees for clarity. If you look carefully you can see the I in GVLIELMVS has been impressed over the letter E, probably because the die engraver stamped in an E and realized he had left out the I. He then over-stamped the E with an I, and placed a new E in the right place.

This error was only noticed relatively recently. Examples carry a book price around twice or more of the standard coin. However, I have now seen the error on almost every 1691 crown I have seen for sale. In my opinion, given the very small number of these coins struck it’s likely they were all struck from the same dies and thus all carry the error, if it only can be seen. It’s not easy to see and so was easily missed, explaining why it went unnoticed.

4. THE 1692 ‘2 over 2’ ERROR

One of the best-known is part of the 1692 issue of crowns under William and Mary shown above. The die-engraver had a problem: he had to squeeze in REX ET REGINA, instead of one or the other. This was not a problem with the 1689 and 1690 halfcrowns, but when the design reverted to a cross of shields there was not enough room. The only way to cope was to remove the date and set it around the middle that under these monarchs depicted the Lion of Nassau. The halfcrowns of 1691-3, and the crowns of 1691-2, all had the date in the centre. Some of the 1692 crown dies confused the die-engravers who placed the ‘2’ upside down. A new ‘2’ was stamped in the die, but the old one was still just visible and remains so on surviving coins.

5. THE 1693 ‘3 over 3’ ERROR

The 1693 halfcrowns of William and Mary include an error where the 3 was stamped the wrong way round. This was corrected the same way as the 1692 crown above. If you look at the ‘3’ carefully you can see the traces of an upside ‘3’ beneath it. This coin appears at the top of the Milled Coinage page.

6. THE 1696 ‘GEI’ ERROR

During William III’s sole reign some crowns were produced in 1696 with a remarkable mistake. Instead of the legend reading GVLIELMVS DEI GRA(TIA), ‘William, by the Grace of God’, a G was stamped instead of a D, producing GVLIELMVS GEI GRA (see left).

These coins are fairly rare and in most cases the condition seems to be relatively poor. Presumably most were withheld or recalled and melted down. Those that escaped into circulation wore down and were less likely to be noticed.

7. THE 1696 ‘6 over 5’ 0R ‘1696/5’ ‘ERROR’

Another William III error found is where a 1695 die was used, but had been altered to amend the date to 1696. This might have been to help with the additional load on the mint in that year, by making reuse of the previous year’s dies possible. The result is that the last 6 in the date is struck over 5 (above). You can detect this from an irregularity within the loop of the 6, and the way the upper right hand side of the loop has a pronounced bulge. Look at the difference between the first 6 and the second 6. In fact this is NOT really an error, and is best regarded as an updated die to help relieve pressure on the busy mint. There are many examples from other dates throughout the period of a similar alteration being made.

This type is often said to be ‘very rare’ but in practice it’s nothing like as scarce as sometimes suggested. Seaby’s English Silver Coinage lists this type (no. 90) as ‘C2’ (which means extremely common). Cope and Raynor (The Standard Catalogue of the English Milled Coinage 1662-1972, London 1975) also give it as C2. Quite why the current Seaby catalogue (2005) therefore lists it as £425 in Fine is a mystery to me. Either it’s wrong, or the other two books are wrong. But I have seen numerous examples of the 1696/5 error, several of which were not identified as such, and own two myself. So if you see one for a high price, pass on it – another is bound to turn up.

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