Five American Coins I Found......

No he's real. I think he's related to Lynyrd Skynyrd...

It was £2 well spent It's a local auction place that usually auction sheep and cows and quite a lot of the stuff goes for a pound..... the coins were in a box of random rubbish and I don't think anybody "rummaged" in the box. It always pays to go to the preview day and have a damned good rummage around in the boxes, most of the good stuff is hidden inside these boxes

Does anybody know any more about the evasion halfpenny?

As I was typing this it struck me that it is not much different today. The Royal Mint has announced it is changing the pound to "The Most Secure Coin in the World" due to there being so many counterfeits in circulation. I guess things have not changed that much.

I don't think it is an Evasion piece. The picture is not the best and the reverse is eroded. The last digit from that image moght be a 6 or it might be a 5, the 5 they used on the genuine half pence looked similar to a 6 and could look like one with some corrosion. The weight would be important to telling for sure what it is. Close to legal weight it is probably real, significantly underweight a circulating counterfeit .

Also the true evasion pieces did not match the real coins in some way. Wrong Monarch for the date, facing the wrong way, mis-spelled legends, nonsense legends, or just different legends that would look "similar" to the illiterate. Such as GEORGE RULES for GEORGUS REX. The evasions were called that because under the current counterfeiting laws a coin was only a counterfeit if it was an exact copy of the regal coin. So these pieces with their "changes" were able to evade the counterfeiting law and their makers could not be prosecuted if caught.

Then there were the coins that WERE exact copies of the regal coins. These were the counterfeit half pence. They tried to copy the real coins designs exactly and the counterfeiters made their money for making the coins lighter than the legal weight. I believe the tower standard was 46 half pence to the pound of copper and the counterfeits sometimes ran as low as 96 halfpence coins from a pound of copper.

Boulton's penny and two pence coppers actually did tend to drive the bad coppers out of circulation. No one wanted the lightweight counterfeits or the evasion pieces, but they did like the Conder tokens and during the time they were in production they were preferred even over the real regal coins, because the genuine circulating Conders (There were counterfeit Conder tokens as well that were underweight) were coined to the tower standard or were even heavier than the regal coins (which by this time were worn and lighter in weight.) So it was a case of the "bad" money being better than the "good" money. Boulton's coinage though was on the same weight standard as the good Conders. So given the choice between the regal cons and the tokens, both at the same standard, and with the regal coins being good anywhere while the tokens were only readily accepted locally, the regal coins were preferred.

I suspect it may be regal because the counterfeiters didn't usually do that good a job on the shield design by Britannia. The shield on this one looks well done.

Just weighed the halfpenny and it comes in at 6.84 grams and the overall dimension is 28mm.

Mike.