1652 New England 3 Pence?

Something seems off about the parellel lines on the E in this photo

Ya, hmm looks good to me ! Looks old...

I would expect a contemporary counterfeit to be either noticeably underweight, or significantly lower fineness silver. Back then the coins value and acceptance was based on their weight and fineness and were intended to contain nearly their full face value in the precious metal content. The only way for a counterfeiter to profit was by shorting the amount of silver either through debasement or by shorting the weight of the coin. This piece seems to be proper weight and fineness which would seem to eliminate a contemporary counterfeit.

Now a copy could be another matter. A copy would either be made as a souvenir, as a "representative" piece for a collector, or as an outright fake intended to fool a collector and be sold as genuine. A souvenir most likely would not be proper weight and fineness, and most copies of early Mass silver I have seen are also too thick. A representative piece probably also would not be proper weight and fineness. Most such representative pieces are often electrotypes but that would be difficult to impossible on early Mass silver unless they were made overly thick.

That leaves a fake to fool a collector, or a genuine piece. The one thing that bothers me is the NE punch seems to match one from a sixpence better than it seems to match the one on the known unique III pence. But I suppose Hull could have used a 6 pence punch. One question I would have is were the punches different sizes for the different denominations, or could they be used interchangable? If the sizes are different, a nineteenth century forger wanting to make a 3 pence probably couldn't get his hands on the one genuine piece, and probably not a good enough image to make an exact copy of the punch. So what would they do? They could possibly get a sixpence and make a copy of hte punch from that coin in the 3 pence size. So how does the NE punch on this coin compare tot he size of the punch on the six pence that it matches?

Any updates? It's been a week. If it's real, I can understand why you might want to "go dark", or maybe you're posting elsewhere?

@Wideglide It indeed was and is a great flick. It's in my dvd/blu-ray collection.

Hello everyone,

Just a small update since a long time.
I am in contact with an auction house and they are still optimistic.
However, it is important to gather as much information about this coin as possible to determine the authenticity.
It would also have to go to the USA to have it examined by a number of experts and possibly to compare it with the only other known copy.

Recently I also had a very interesting offer from a collector who wants to buy the coin "as is" from me.
So now I have to consider what I am going to do, sell the coin for a good offer or enter a probably long process to determine the authenticity and then auction it off. However, if he is found to be genuine, he could earn even more than the current bid.

Unfortunately, I cannot put all my time in this coin because my business should continue as usual, but I will keep doing it and as soon as there are new developments I will report it here.

There was a second known threepence. That one was stolen from yale. Theres a Possibility that this is that coin resurfacing after many years? You may want to contact them. If it isn't their coin they may have some pictures to help authenticate yours!

Just a casual observation - several times I have seen coins like this get brokered by a dealer in a private sale that then show up 6 months later at a major auction and net 5-10x what the private sale was for. Yes, the person making you the offer will have to take the risk and do the rest of the legwork. It seems like someone like Stacks would do the work for you but I'm not sure. Sending it off to the US would sure make me nervous! (I'd fly over with it personally if it were normal times...)