scottishmoney

To narrow down what the intended coin was you would have to get an accurate weight of the piece and find out what the BRM was striking at that time.

I think you will find we are a constitutional monarchy that pretends to be a democracy We have a constitution? The Magna Carta is about as close as your going to likely get.

Ah gash, you forgot hardheads, turners an' hatpieces.

It wasn't a theft, rather it was a "repatriation" of state property of the USSR.

I collect 17th century tokens myself.

I wonder if whence I have croaked and am pushing up weeds they will auction my hoard as "property of a gentleman" ?

Much better selling it through CWTS as opposed to eBay. I don't even look at eBay most of the time anymore. Here is where I look at CWT: http://www.civilwartokens.com/

The great thing about Civil War tokens is there is a lot of variety. You can even find them with warships, guns etc. I bought one a couple of years ago that is very rare and was dug up in a local church's vegetable garden where it was likely lost soon after it was circulated in 1863.

The only redeeming thing with cents in the USA is I can buy up bags and boxes of rolls at the bank and search through them and find old fogies like the 1874 and 1890 that I found last month. In the past few years I have found a couple of dozen cents that were older than 100 years old.

Five quid was a decent amount of dosh then. The design wasn't carried on to the smaller note, by then BoE decided to put HRH on the fiver - which really was a shame. British banks, particularly those in England had a tradition of sorts of NOT having a portrait or even cipher of the monarch on notes as a bit of a superstition - a couple of Scottish banks didn't follow such beliefs - and failed spectacularly - City of Glasgow bank was one in 1878 that had had small portraits of Queen Victoria on their notes. A similar pattern followed in British North America - the banks like Westmoreland Bank that had portraits of Queen Victoria bought the farm - the only exception to the rule was Bank of Toronto which kept portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on their notes into the late 1930s.

The Lion and Key is a classic English note: And a lovely Britannia:

For the paste 40+ years England has done a wonderful job of printing notes with references to non-political historical figures. I'd like to get this note sometime.

Can it be legally done in Britain? I have seen discussions on a Canadian forum where this subject has come up.

Good luck - if I saw it in front of me and could rotate the coin I might be able to determine the markers for the different types. Kind of looks like farmland find materiel that got chunked into a rotovator.

A bit like the Irish punt, was worth about 90p but you only ever got 1:1 if you spent an English pound over there. There was a brief stint ca. 1975-7 when the Irish currency was actually worth a bit more than a British quid. It was so unusual that it made the news in all rounds.

I could rather see it like the Scots pound of old, ie 12:1 - the Scots pound was a unit of account until the 1760s or so and was valued at 12 Scots to 1 British/English. When the Brent crude dries up the Scots pound will trade like toilet paper.

In these days bankers go on in their perfidious pursuits. In days of old they were in the very least run out of town, but much more likely were gaoled or even worse. I do believe that a few exceptional cases shall have earned the latter sentence - as an example. AIG, RBS, HBOS, Lehman Brothers - doesn't matter the ilk - but a wee bit of drawn blood might satiate the need for consequence.

http://news.yahoo.com/uk-39-osborne-rule-currency-union-independent-scotland-074618069--sector.html Canna have your cake an' eat it twa it seems. In the unlikely event that Scotland did opt for independence I could see some two decades down the road serious regrets ala the split up of Czechoslovakia. Now Czechs and Slovaks are pondering why the world they needed to split a country that was getting along just fine - no real ethnic tensions etc like Jugoslavia.

That's true for the US I'm sure, but the observations I've seen here are that they are not so good with UK coins. That's my perception too. I was referring to non-USA (world) coins in general between the two main USA TPGs. Almost without exception, when offered two coins of the same numeric grade from PCGS and NGC, I rarely prefer the PCGS example over the NGC example. I'm just talking numeric grade here, not either services ability to attribute varieties, etc. And, I'm also speaking with reference to not just UK coins, but also other European, Asian, African, and South American coins. Again, just my opinion based on my observations. Mileage may vary. With USA coins I view the opposite - USA coins in a higher grade tend to be better in PCGS holders than NGC. Quite frankly PCGS is a veritable virgin whence it comes to grading British or other "foreign" coins - they were rather late to the boat.

TPG plastic does nothing for me. Someone in some oxygen and light deprived cubicle's opinion of a coin is just that. All that really matters is what I think based on my knowledge. Maybe more collectors should pony up and learn and have confidence in what they collect.

As a person of Scottish descent I can offer a unique opinion. Quite inconvenient the truth about the whole Union of 1707 it is - it really was not the Anglish that wanted the whole deal - but rather the Scots. There was a little trifle in Scots economics called the "Darien Scheme" which was a colonial project in what is now Panama in Central America. It was Scotland's attempt at a colony that failed miserably and practically bankrupted the whole country. So Scots politicians brought up the whole Act of Union idea with the English parliament - seeking in return for their political acquiescence to a United Kingdom a practical financial bailout in the form of the "Equivalent Fund" which was paid out by England to Scotland into the 1720s. Fast forward three centuries - the whole Royal Bank of Scotland bailout by the British Treasury. Hmmm. Autonomy - certainly. A clean break, might wanna think about that, could have some narsty consequences.

I wonder how much the BRM is melting - ie post 1971 coinage, but pre-plated steel? I know the Royal Canadian Mint is actively retiring all bronze and nickel coinage and melting them and selling the result.

My oldest finds by denomination: Cent - 1874 - just last week, also found an 1890 the following day in a roll search. Nickel - 1890 found early last year Dime - 1923 got last year Quarter 1928 - found in the reject slot of a coin counter machine in 2012 Half - 1942 found in a bank in late 2012 Dollar - an 1897 I bought in a restaurant when I was a kid - the customer before me had spent it.

That good old yank preacher Pat Robertson called Scotland a dark dark land - after he was hired to do promos for the Scottish tourism board - he referred to Scotland so because of some similar thing. Those busying themselves condemning others to a hell will oft find themselves there instead.

From experience not many tellers would think the $5 gold piece was real. I have never found gold in a bank nor have I heard of any stories of it in the last 20 or so years. But silver, even silver dollars from before 1935 turn up from time to time. I have come across large quantities of silver halves: These I found in 2011. Here is one that a teller saved for me a couple of months ago: It pays to pay these young, attractive tellers off with candy etc. There is one that when she gets bored she goes through the rolls looking for stuff that she then lets me buy for face value. I am trying to get her to collect.