Wooow!!
Sylvestius
Posts: 1,584 ✭
Man how gorgeous is this?
I found it on a website whilst trying to find some French coins, John of Naples a franc à pied struck sometme around 1372.
Wonderful... simply exquisit.
I found it on a website whilst trying to find some French coins, John of Naples a franc à pied struck sometme around 1372.
Wonderful... simply exquisit.
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Steve
My OmniCoin Collection
My BankNoteBank Collection
Tom, formerly in Albuquerque, NM.
<< <i>
Do you ever wonder who might have 'rescued' these pieces thorugh the centuries?
<< <i>It might actually be fun to tie Scottish and French coins of the 13-15th c. together as an Auld Alliance collection group.
Do you ever wonder who might have 'rescued' these pieces thorugh the centuries? >>
In answer to your first question that one i had subconciously thought of before, think Mary Queen of Scots, think gold ducats in the name of Mary and Francis.
Which'd go nice with Anglo-Spanish coins of 1554-8.
Second question. I should think coins of such high face value spent most of their time sat in chests with other similar coins and little time in circulation, actually no time in circulation. They probably never came out of the chest, in trade agreements and purchases between royal households or between merchants the chest were probably just shipped about intact.
Merchants in Italy used to leave the chests where they were but gave out paper bonds to say the person had so much money in such and such place, and if they bought something with it, they'd run it through the bankers in the Italian cities who then issued the next person with a bond saying yep you have now got so much sat here that's yours. So the coins never made it very far. Unless they were going to Byzantium and then the actually gold would go itself and be circulated there.
Of course as the times went on and coins were reduced in weight during recoinages the old coins were the same face value as the new but were now overweight for the face value and were worth more as gold. So people kept them rather than handing them in!
Of course once a coin gets beyond a certain age people will keep it as something from their grandparents or something and the older it gets the less chance anything nasty is going to happen to it. Eventually it'll end up in the hands of a collector and spend the remainder of it's life sat in a velvet drawer somewhere.
High denomination coins in top grades aren't so rare, low denomination coins in top grades though... god luck finding an EF farthing of the same period.
What reference material is available for the early French coins?
<< <i>Do you ever wonder who might have 'rescued' these pieces thorugh the centuries? >>
That's easy - what is this hobby known as ? The Hobby of Kings. It's not just because it was a catchy title - it's because kings and the nobility were the only ones who could afford to collect coins.
Coin collections were a major competition amongst the royalty & nobility of the Old World. They were constantly trying to outdo each other, to find the nicest examples, assemble the largest and most complete collection. Kinda remind you of something that takes place today ??
But that's how these coins survived to the present day.