JLS

Thank you all for all the information, fascinating ! It's curious if it was the first issue that no high grade examples/proofs exist. I guess after the 1694 coinage there was no need to do so for technical reasons and the transition to the new obverse design may have been relatively simple.

Please do - would be very interested !

Nice ! Here are photographs of my specimen. Maybe Poor + ? Yours is actually dated 1696 right ? I haven't seen the Cowley piece.

! For what it's worth I paid a derisory sum for mine. Maybe I should be in touch with Mark.

Excellent, thanks Rob. Will be interesting to see what I'll achieve for one in today's market !

It's the same type. Most of these issues haven't had good die studies done on them so there will be variations in location of lettering etc. under the same reference number. Just compare the obverses of the two pieces you've linked to; the C of CAESAR is much closer to Nero's bust on the second one. In the end the dies were hand made so every die pairing arguably represents a variety.

Looks like corrosion from exposure to water or moisture to me. On worn coins there are often good (albeit time consuming) ways to remedy this sort of damage, but on anything uncirculated with original lustre, you would end up with a toned coin at best. Really nice decimal coins ex-circulation (as opposed to out of mint sets) can be quite hard to find. 0

This is usual; it is rarer to see examples struck on virgin flans (you can tell by the edge, different graining). I've owned a couple of overstruck ones but not the virgin flan type, although they do come up occasionally. Yours is a nice example; like most 19th century penny tokens these were very heavily circulated and not terribly well made in the first place, so anything VF or better is scarce.

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1714-Qeen-Anne-Farthing/293776074386 Ol' Qeen Anne, she look'd like a man...

I don't have one but I would recommend buying one in a slab if without auction provenance, because there are some unpleasantly convincing fakes of these.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/164311038725 Not brass, just Brasso'd !

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/164366913368 It is like a proof...a proof which has been polished beyond recognition !

"Worn only for these photographs"...perhaps that's how the stretching was discovered...

What is "holy" about it has none, so it must be a protestant shilling....

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/224130909782 A very rare mint error indeed...

As is any single die combination for any Victorian penny, to be fair. Just not enough made.

50 pence collecting is very new, but I think it's a fashion which will last, so I would expect some of these other sets to get more attention, and it's great for the hobby - I think past waves of coin collecting have sprung out of people being able to find rarities in their change - think of US collecting in the immediate post-war period (when you could get things like 1932 D quarters in your change), or the British market in the 1960s around decimalization. Whether it will make the 1970s sets worth £50 each is another matter. I hope not, but then on the other side the wholesale price being around £5 a set at auction is a little silly, especially given the difficulty of finding some of the sets with red lustrous copper - I went through a whole dealer's stock of them recently and found none I wanted to purchase. Probably the value for all of these will settle somewhere in between.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/203081740668 Not an Edward VII penny. You can see Liverpool in the distance though !

The reality is that supply of all of these is somewhat "thin", even if they're not scarce in any meaningful sense. There may have been 100,000 issued e.g. for 1974 but some of these will have been split up/damaged/ugly toned, and the vast majority of the others will be owned by collectors and other people who bought them close to the release date. The number immediately accessible to the market is going to be in the low thousands, and that's the sort of supply which can be overwhelmed by sudden demand. Unlike the Kew Gardens 50 pence pieces, I don't think this is a case of someone stashing these away with an expectation of profit (yet !); there really are enough customers to exhaust demand at least temporarily.

Out of stock already. I'm tempted to buy up some sets for the other years with no currency 50 pences...if a few people go for it, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If sovereigns are legal tender in Australia to today, what is their nominal value ?

Not sure if I have enough expertise in the series to be a "penny person" but I've consigned some decent pennies recently - all to BSJ though. The ones in the last sale did alright; it may well quickly become a good market to sell in if people don't consign.

Well, a repro sold as genuine is as good as a fake to me on eBay. If you're not familiar with the type the style might be convincing, especially from photographs. This is one of the only relatively good copies of a common 18th century token which comes up with frequency; previously published in TCSB among other places. But whether the original intent was to deceive is unclear.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Exeter-Halfpenny-token-1792/402352651395 A notorious modern fake - pretty obvious if you compare closely to the original, but we token collectors don't normally have to worry about such things too much....

I wouldn't give up hope on it being delivered or safely returned by the postal service...an item I sent to Singapore in February landed in my post box a few weeks ago, envelope was covered in stickers from Germany, who ended up receiving it in error - I assume it got stuck to something on the way...