Help With A Great Britian Denomination Set

Here are some 2 pounds anyway: http://www.drakesterling.com.au/coi...-2/two-pound
And sovereigns did circulate (mostly before World War I) but I think they were more accustomed to living in bank vaults than being spent.

This design is much the same as the one used on the gold coinage. It is St George, patron saint of England, slaying the dragon. The design was made by Italian medallist Benedetto Pistrucci.


Yes indeed they were. As Mr T said, it was mainly prior to WWI. From 1897 to 1918, copper farthings were deliberately blackened prior to leaving the mint, to prevent them from easily being confused with half-sovereigns or sovereigns in circulation.

The story behind those low mintages is pretty interesting!

The rich gold miners returning from the Yukon (and plenty more poor ones) wanted a place to refine their gold and strike it into a trusted format, ready for trade.

The Royal Canadian Mint expected them all to come back through Ottawa and strike their gold into sovereigns, but where did the ungrateful louts end up? San Francisco!! The route was easier and it cost less to strike your gold into Eagles there. Canada received only a fraction of the expected demand, and all C-mint sovereigns are pretty hard to come by. (We didn't strike dollar-denominated gold coins until 1912, four years after the sovereign program was started.)

The $5 and $10 coins also saw low mintages (never exceeding 170,000), and they were gone for good by 1914. The C-mint sovereigns sputtered on until 1919, despite mintages below 4,000 in some years.

I have a proof Five Pounds and a proof Two Pounds of 1937. However, the 1937 Sovereign and Half of 1937 are much harder to find, apart from the gold proof set.

Generally speaking, gold coins were replaced in circulation by paper money just before the First World War, for most countries.
Most countries came off the Gold Standard, by 1933, and so gold coins were not minted at all until tha advent of collector gold coins, starting from about the 1980's.

I have very few 'made for collector' NCLT coins of any sort.