Post Your Old Times Deniers And Pennies (600-1700 C. E.)

Nice coin, Spence.

Ahh thx for that information @era!

Here is a Denier from the Swiss Bishopric of Geneva. Again, I've only got it dated to the whole 14th Century.

Great add, Spence.

Both good questions @dear because it does seem like this thread is a sweet spot for my collection. Since my coin inventory is in Excel, I've reorganized that spreadsheet to help tell this story.

The early part of my coin collecting was with US coins, partly due to a small number of Whitman folders and the like that I inherited and partly through CRHing. By mid-1999 or so, I began to shift away from US and move toward world coins, either through travel or ebay purchases. Toward the end of that year and into 2000 I started working on my OFEY (although to be fair I dabbled with OFEC in this same time frame). My earliest purchase of coins which will be posted to this thread was a group of ten 16th-Century Hungarian Denars. Including shipping, each one was less than $9 and in one fell swoop I notched ten new years. Rather than focus on large (and expensive) silver coins like Crowns or Thalers, I definitely gravitated toward the smaller denominations. I'm still chipping away at my OFEY collection, although I have somewhat stayed away from including AH dated coins. Levinson's book on the early dated coinage of Europe has been a huge enabler of this effort. Of late, I've also definitely started to dig further back into history and generally am now picking up more coins from the dark ages than the middle ages. There is a lot less information available (especially written in English, but really at all) so that challenge makes this interesting for me.

I'm not sure exactly when I transitioned away from ebay as a source (2002 to 2005 or so), but it was definitely due to a few bad eggs selling me counterfeit or grossly misconstrued coins. Nowadays, many of my purchases come from stores that sell on ma-shops, which is more EU-centric than the US-based vcoins (of course many stores sell on both platforms). There are a couple other sellers like Frank Robinson and Elsen for which I am a frequent bidder. I should point out that @tdz has opened my eyes to a much broader array of European auction houses. Many, but not all, are on the numisbids platform.

Here are a pair of early-14th Century Deniers from the French Duchy of Burgundy. They were struck at Dijon under the authority of Hugo V. He died childless at about age 30.

I never shy away from sounding ignorant ... who is Frank Robinson? (I only know of the HOF outfielder who played for the Reds and Orioles when I was a kid).

And that Irish penny is super! As expressed by others, I really admire what you've put together on this theme .

As for Elsen ... this one just arrived today. Lower Lotharingia, Count Lambert II of Leuven (1040-1063), Brussels mint:



In the first photo, the mint name is in the shape of a cross: left-to-right BRVOC, then bottom to top SE LLA (BRVOCSELLA = Brussels). In the corners are the letters S G P E. Their meaning is unknown, but one guess I have seen is S G for Saint Gudule, the patron of Brussels, and PE for Saint Peter, patron saint of Leuven.

Too bad for the pinhole (advertised as a planchet flaw), but it's a fairly scarce type.

He is a NY-based seller who sends out emails for his auctions (mostly focused on ancients and world coins) and has been the subject of a several prior CCF threads. Here are links to a few:

http://goccf.com/t/451956
http://goccf.com/t/280307
http://goccf.com/t/452010

Here is an early-14th Century Denar from Brandenburg. It was issued under the authority of Waldemar "The Great" and was the nephew of Otto IV mentioned upthread aways.

This early-14th Century uniface Austrian Pfennig features a squirrel.

Very nice Spence!!