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Coinery

Henry VII Groat - Dies Punches Estimate

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Rob P - excerpt taken from ‘Henry VII Groat Without Mintmark’ thread

“Guaranteed to be a lot of dies.

Potter & Winstanley note 16 obverse dies for no mark, lis and Greyhound's Head, but give up when it comes to Cross Crosslet. For what it is worth, they list 7 dies each for no mark and Lis, plus another 2 for Greyhound's Head. Crosslet is much more common. As far as the reverses go, you can reasonably expect a minimum of twice the number of obverse dies. Greyhound's Head being the rarest and hence the simplest case, the sylloge has an example of dies 15/16 (nearly identical) plus 3 GH reverses from 2 dies including muled marks. Add to that my GH rev. (below) plus another not in the Ashmolean gives a total of 4 GH rev. dies I know for certain. You are unlikely to be looking at more than another one or two reverses, if they do indeed exist.

A back of the fag packet calculation assuming 1:2 obv:rev gives a total of 50 or so rare mark dies for both sides, plus a guesstimate of say 100 crosslets would give a total of 150ish tentative dies for all marks. If someone wants to do the survey, then we can plumb in the numbers and obtain a more precise estimate of the number of dies.”

c2083 H7 tentative 4d mm. lis-GH2.jpg

 
Edited by Coinery
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The other greyhound reverse die is the Motcomb coin (below) with the im at 9 o'clock. As far as I am aware, both these two are unique for the reverse die. At the time of the Montagu sale my coin was considered unique, but a handful have appeared since then, including those in SCBI 23. The above was considered rare enough to be illustrated in Montagu (wax on rev) and although subsequent coins have come to light, GH groats in either pure or muled form are still extremely rare.

lis-greyhound.jpg

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It appears that even the reverse legend orientations are dramatic, quite a series!

Edited by Coinery

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It was experimental. The testoons also show a wide range of dies. A testoon reverse was also paired with a groat obv.

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40 minutes ago, Rob said:

It was experimental. The testoons also show a wide range of dies. A testoon reverse was also paired with a groat obv.

I suppose it was, really, the beginning of a new style; would explain the number of punches and die variations, definitely.

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