Edward The Confessor, Money/Mint Help, Question

to the community

This is not my area, but others here should be able to help. We are going to need to see the other side of the coin.

@mafru2, first welcome to CCF. Second, that is a very interesting coin that you are posting. I see that it can be attributed as Spink #1179 and therefore is dated between 1053 and 1056 AD.

I do see a few areas of variation on these coins. First, yours has an annulet in the third quarter, but some have the annulet in other quarters or even no annulet at all. I'm by no means an expert in this area, but I think that the annulet signifies that the coin was minted in York.

Second, there are many variations in the inscriptions. In a quick web search, I'm actually not seeing any coins of this variety with exactly the same inscriptions and also none of them match the plate coin in Spink. Here are a couple links of potential interest.

https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=l...580&lot=1176
http://www.londoncoins.co.uk/?page=...searchtype=1

I also get nervous when my coins don't exactly match what I see online or in the books. Certainly, the standards for literacy among die sinkers in the year 1053 AD England were not particularly high and so it shouldn't be too surprising for us to see some variation in their output.

I recognize that I'm not really answering your implied question of real vs. fake. I would say that there is nothing that jumps out at me that you have a fake though.

Spence and flippy, thanks for your response.

I didn't really think of literacy as an issue but that is interesting. I guess I naturally want to assume that there was some governance of the dies but clearly that is not the case.