ENGLISH FAKES AND FORGERIES MILLED COINAGE

Dr. Adrian Marsden completes his examination of coin forgeries of the past with a survey of imitations of the English milled coinage

Until the Post-Medieval period English coins were invariably hammered – struck between two dies by hand. It was a laborious method but had the weight of tradition behind it and early attempts to introduce milled coinage – made in a press – were very unpopular and eventually dropped. England had experimented with milled coinage from as early as the reign of Elizabeth I but the large screw presses took many years to catch on and it was not until the second half of the seventeenth century, in the reign of Charles II, that production of coins by milling machines became the norm.

Milling machines produce neater coins and can place raised or incuse lettering on the edge that should make forgery much more difficult. Be that as it may, silver plated copies of milled coins with lettering on the edge are known, a tribute to the ingenuity of the forgers. A false crown of Charles II carrying the date 1672 has been effectively demonetised by being hacked up (figure 1). Now the coin’s base nature can be clearly seen, the green of the copper alloy being visible under the silver skin. But the edge of the coin remains uncompromised with no splitting where the silver plating was joined. This was a very competent piece of work and we cannot

be certain how its fake nature became apparent; perhaps it was slightly underweight.

Another large milled silver coin, a halfcrown of William III (figure 2), does show some of the base core coming through on the edges but the coin is worn practically smooth and must have passed muster as genuine for many, many years before being lost. There are other silver plated copies of this era that turn up but not many; presumably the technology available to forgers at the time was not often sufficient for their needs. We do, however, with the increasing number of records and publishing in this period, know the identity of some of these forgers.

Perhaps the most famous was one William Chaloner, a very enterprising forger who produced excellent copies of guineas, crowns and halfcrowns in the 1690s. He claimed that corrupt employees at the Royal Mint were not above loaning out coining equipment to counterfeiters. These arguments did not save him; Sir Isaac Newton, controller of the Royal Mint, was determined to bring Chaloner to book and, after compiling a watertight case against him, the unfortunate Chaloner was hung in March 1699. Chaloner’s career is a fascinating one; he was not confined to production of fake coinage but had many other sidelines including forged lottery tickets, bank notes and bills of exchange, and was successful that he rode in a carriage and lived like a gentleman.

William III’s so-called Great Recoinage of the late 1690s meant that there was relatively little production of silver coinage in the 18th century, the large numbers of silver coins of William sufficing the need of the public. The same could not be said of the copper coinage; throughout the first half of the

18th century halfpennies seem to have been produced in some quantity but this changed on the accession of George III in 1760. No copper was produced for the first ten years of the reign and then, after a short window of minted between 1770 and 1775, the presses at the mint fell silent once more.

The result was a massive currency shortage. We have looked at earlier currency shortages in past copies of this magazine, such as those which affected Roman Britain in the third and fourth centuries and that which gripped England and Wales in the 1650s and 1660s. This shortage offered opportunities for any forger with an eye for the main chance; in a period when money is scarce, people will accept coins that they might otherwise have been less willing to take.

Most of the new forgeries were cast copies of light weight (figures 3-4). We have seen cast forgeries in the Roman period and the 18th century halfpennies display most of the broad characteristics that the Roman casts show. They are usually much lighter than they should be, often have a woolly appearance and the remains of a rim on the edge where the two halves of the mould met. Examples that have been in the ground often have a silvery green patina, probably the result of a significant amount of tin in the alloy, added to bring down the required melting temperature. The moulds were generally impressed with genuine coins – or perhaps with casts of the same – and so they appear stylistically correct. Many old coins were (quite literally) pressed into service in this way and so counterfeits of coins dating as far back as the reign of Charles II are encountered.

As well as the characteristic appearance of cast copies mentioned above there can be other clues as to a fake’s unofficial origins. Sometimes mismatched moulds could be put together, leading to coins where the king’s head on the obverse and the date on the reverse do not correspond. If the metal poured into the mould was not heated to quite the right temperature, it would cool too quickly as it entered the mould, leaving hollow areas that manifest as either holes in the coin or bits missing from the edge (figures 5-6).

The situation was not addressed for many years and, despite the existence of the cast copies, there was still a shortfall that was made good by large scale production of halfpenny tokens in the early 1790s. These tokens are, of course, a subject in their own right and far beyond the scope of this article.

There are many references to coiners in the

press and literature of the time and the careers of a number of coiners are to be found in the collection of criminal biographies known as the Newgate Calendar. The work spans the 18th and 19th centuries and gives interesting insights as to how coining operations worked and how the snide they produced was put into circulation.

The introduction of George III’s so-call

Bull head silver issues in 1816 was met with a flurry of forgery. The majority of these forgeries are very convincing in terms of their general appearance but the silver wash that they were coated with seems to have been very thin and, unlike many other silver-plated copies that have been found in the ground, they are usually instantly and obviously recognisable as imitations (figure 7). Even those that have never been in the ground rarely keep much of their silvering; it seems that often the thin coating was basically no more resilient than paint (figure 8).

The same period that saw an outbreak of silver copies, the 1810s and 1820s, also witnessed the production of a significant number of forgeries of the new gold denomination, the sovereign. It is difficult to see how two examples of George IV sovereign forgeries, one dated 1822 (figure 9) and the other 1829 (figure 10), might have deceived. The 1822 example has a slight speck of gilding remaining, that of 1829 none at all. Their weight is also much lower than it should have been but the fact they were produced at all, not to mention the references we get to forgeries of gold coins in the literature, demonstrates that their makers believed they had a reasonable chance of passing them.

As an alternative to producing silver plated forgeries, pewter was another option. Pewter, an alloy consisting mainly of tin with the addition of other metals such as antimony and lead, has a silver colour and a good weight. It would have been convincing when new and wears well. Unfortunately, it does not survive at all well in the soil and crumbles away, eventually to nothing. One example a pewter copy of a George III Bull head halfcrown is crumbling badly (figure 11); another, a crown of Victoria, was found in heavy clay but has still sustained corrosion, especially to the reverse (figure 12).

As we have seen, coin forgery is endemic throughout history, occasionally assuming epidemic proportions.

In a society where coin use seems to be dying off at a rapid rate in many sectors, it is appropriate to end this article with what will probably be the last British coin to have been forged in enormous numbers. When the one pound coin was introduced in 1982 to replace the old one pound note – appropriately enough featuring Sir Isaac Newton – it was not long before fakes began to appear (figure 13). I remember that the earliest of these could be shockingly bad, lead alloy discs covered in golden paint which would have been spotted by anyone making even a cursory examination of them. Later, the standards improved and many of the fakes would pass unnoticed with only those who knew what to look for being likely to pick them out. Of course pound coins were used in such volume that closely checking them in the course of a transaction was all but impossible.

The number of forged one pound coins in circulation reached several percent by the middle of the 2010s and so the bimetallic pound coin was introduced, followed by the bimetallic two pound coin. The idea was that the new coins would prove much harder to forge but this didn’t really prove to be the case; immediately coins with a painted inner disc or a painted outer surround appeared. On close inspection these might be spotted but, as we have said, close inspection is rarely an option. A fake coin, of course, only needs to pass once and its job is done. Fakes and forgeries of coins have been with us ever since coinage began and will no doubt be with us for as long as coins are made. The game goes on!