Details On Queen Anne Coin

Last of the Stuarts 1703-1714. That is at least six pence. E is for Edinburgh.

Queen Anne's all-too-brief reign saw in the formal unification of the kingdoms of England and Scotland into one kingdom in 1707, with one parliament and one coinage.

Article 16 of the Act of Union stated that "...a Mint shall be continued in Scotland, under the same Rules as the Mint in England, and the present Officers of the Mint continued, subject to such Regulations and Alterations as her Majesty, her Heirs or Successors, or the Parliament of Great-Britain, shall think fit". So part of the "deal" with unification was that the new British government would keep the Edinburgh mint open and continue to strike coins there. This they did - for all of two years, before shutting the Edinburgh Mint down in 1709.

So the only possible dates for your coin are 1707, 1708 and 1709. The date is to the left of the abbreviation "MAG"; I can clearly see the underpart of the numeral "7" there next to the M, so yours is a 1707 coin. We can't tell just from the pics whether it's a shilling or sixpence, as they had the exact same design only different in size.

In order to not break the Treaty, the Edinburgh Mint's officials were kept on the payroll and the empty Mint premises retained until finally being sold off in 1830. The now-empty title "Governor of the Mint of Scotland" was retained by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer until this title too was finally abolished with decimalization in 1971.

The Scottish are still a little bit upset at this underhanded job-stealing money-saving tactic by the British government.

In the short period while it was in operation as a British Royal Mint, the Edinburgh Mint's main function was to collect the now-withdrawn Scottish silver coinage, melt it down and re-issue the silver as fine silver British coin. So, your coin there is likely made from melted-down ryals, bawbees, merks and other Scottish coins.

As for the hole, well, coins were holed for several reasons. Counterfeit coins were commonly defaced by being nailed to a wall through the centre; this hole is too off-centre for that to be true here. The hole is carefully placed so that the queen's portrait is non-defaced and right-way-up and this seems too coincidental for it to be an accidnetal alignment. So logically, the coin was holed in order to produce a souvenir of the monarch (perhaps on her death), rather than as a mere hole-of-convenience to carry the coin around as a piece of money.

However, it's evident that Scottish silver coinage continued in the rural Highlands and the Lowlands for many years after Union, simply because most peopke couldn't get to the receiving places - Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow.

I remember my granny telling me that Scottish coppers were stll circulating in 1905 in Inverness-shire.