How Far Back Can We Go? Sixth Edition!

More nice German states!



Yes. I was a busy boy in September, filling in my 1700s with Brabant and Papal States, though none has arrived yet. Also a few new medievals. As mentioned upthread, from 1750 back to 1680s, there were very few coins made at Polish mints in the name of the Polish sovereign.
Here is another Ferrara (Papal States) copper 1/2 baiocco bearing the dual dates 1748 and regnal year VIII:

1747 -- Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, 1 pfennig:

1747 Sweden 1 ore:

I had in my mind that this was a 47. Here it is anyway.

1746 -- Kingdom of Great Britain, 1 farthing:

1746 was a crucial year in British History, it was the year the hopes of a Jacobite recapture of Great Britain and an end to Hanoverian royalty was quashed at Culloden Moor on April 16th.

The resulting fall out led to the Scottish diaspora, the renaissance and the Highland Clearances. There were wounds to the mortal soul of many Scottish people that have still not fully healed.

It was also the 2nd year of the famous Lima silver coins.

Here is my often seen Half crown of 1746 with the Lima mark




Expecting a flood of these pieces for the years 1745 and 1746 I decided to seek this myth of where the Lima silver is from.

The reality is that is Spanish silver from Lima Peru. There were no silver mines in Lima itself, but it was the nearest sea port to the Potosi mines in Bolivia, the Spanish had been mining silver from these mountains since the 1500s and had exploited thousands of Indigenous and Mestico workers since.

The myth is the British under Anson, sacked the sea near Lima and took a mountain of silver back to England. It seems now more likely this did not happen and the silver was seized off a French ship in the North Atlantic in 1745. The silver was believed to have been Spanish (The French and Spanish were allies at the time and against Great Britain), there was some £500,000 worth and one of the pieces of 8 seized had a Lima mintmark on it, hence the name.

http://www.mernick.org.uk/lnc/talks/lima.htm
More here.

In anyways the silver which was a mixture of bars, bullion, cobo de barra (Rough hammered coins) and properly made silver pesos was all melted down and made into Crowns, Halfcrowns, Shillings and Sixpences through 1745 and 1746.

My halfcrown is a well worn VG example and generally was a good buy for what I paid for it ($85NZD).

There was also a quantity of gold seized and this was made into 5 Guinea, 1 Guinea and ½ guinea coins.

1745 -- Kingdom of Great Britain, 1 shilling: