JLS

I don't think so...I think it's just a surface lamination or even a gouge...it's so totally unconvincing it's hard to imagine anyone considering a successful "doctoring" ! The "3" is not even in the right place. But the price is shocking; let's hope it's the vendor bidding against himself (he can do that without scrutiny because it's a private listing sadly).

He's not that bad actually, he sold a real die letter halfpenny a while back, went for a very reasonable £50 (although only Poor or so) given that some people were a bit overly cautious. I buy a fair bit from him, but you have to ignore the description and just look at the pictures, which are normally clear enough to understand exactly what's on offer. It's nice when he beats you to a bulk lot at auction because you know ~ everything will end up on eBay so you get a second chance to snag anything you particularly liked...

Usual Lukasz nonsense. Definitely not a die 3 penny, just a reasonably nice circulated 1863. If bidders are sensible it will go somewhere between £15-40.

I'm pretty sure any one of the major auctioneers in London would take it with a reserve at the £200 mark or so. What it would actually sell for is quite another matter; penny rarities are desirable but the market is fickle, and people will be turned off by the patina/reverse corrosion.

That would make sense of there being so few of them - pretty much any individual die combination for William and Mary or William III copper is extremely rare, and they put much worse dies into service than this.

St. James 3: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=249167 This one got around !

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 !

Hello all, Anyone have a copy of the Spink Numismatic Circular, February 2001? I am curious as to what Spink priced the William III GVLIELMVS DEI GRATIA halfpenny at, as I am thinking about selling my own example which is in very similar grade ! As far as I know, the Shuttlewood piece hasn't been on the market since it was sold by Colin Cooke as part of the Nicholson collection: #78 (http://www.colincooke.com/collections/nicholson_part2.html) Thanks ! JLS

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...

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.