Resources for collecting Shillings?

[Paddy]

Are there any good online resources to help with collecting Victorian Shillings? Two queries I can find little help with:

1. How to tell the various bust types apart - particularly bust 3 and 4?

2. Die numbers - what range of numbers were made and which are more or less common?

[Rob]

Busts 3 & 4 have the hair by the neck below the fillet treated differently. See below. right hand one is 4th bust.

There is a list of die numbers somewhere, but I don't have it to hand. Maybe Nick or someone can help here.

[Nick]

Easiest way to tell Davies obv 4 from Davies obv 5 is the tip of Victoria's bun.  Davies obv 4 ends in a closed loop, Davies obv 5 ends in an open hook as per 1st picture.

1867 is the only year for which both obv 4 and obv 5 exist and there are two reverses, so 4 combinations; 4+A, 4+B, 5+A and 5+B.

DN 16 & 17 are 5+B, DN 18 is 4+B, DN 23 is 5+A, all the rest are 4+A.

The 2nd picture shows Davies obv 6 and obv 7.  Both bun tips are closed loops but slightly different shapes.

The Spink designations are Davies obv 4 (S.3904 & S.3905), obv 5 (S.3906A), obv 6 (S.3907A), obv 7 (S.3907).

Edited February 7, 2018 by Nick

[Nick]

15 hours ago, Paddy said:

2. Die numbers - what range of numbers were made and which are more or less common?

As far as I'm aware, die numbers started at 1 for each year and increased by one every time a new reverse die was produced (for example, 1869 used 15 reverse dies and 1872 used 155).  Therefore the number of dies per year should be the mintage divided by the average mintage per die.  However, the Royal Mint struggled to obtain decent steel during the die number period and thus some dies would only manage to strike a few coins before breaking whereas others might manage as many as 100,000.  This means that some die numbers will be much rarer than others and some no longer extant.

You would need a dedicated die number collector to share their research in order to discover the relative rarity of individual die numbers.

[VickySilver]

Honestly, and this comes from a fairly avid collector of Victorian silver currency issues, the die numbers probably don't matter a whole lot in the overall scheme of things - more of a curiosity thing I would say. Maybe you could do the research!

[Paddy]

27 minutes ago, VickySilver said:

Honestly, and this comes from a fairly avid collector of Victorian silver currency issues, the die numbers probably don't matter a whole lot in the overall scheme of things - more of a curiosity thing I would say. Maybe you could do the research!

Thanks for the thought but I am far from an avid collector of Victorian Shillings and certainly don't have the funds to start building a selection of Die numbers!

Part of my reason for asking was that I picked up a fairly worn 1878 Shilling and I was struggling to work out whether it was Spinks Third head or fourth head, which correspond to Nick's 5th and 6th bust above (I think). With the benefit of his pictures I believe it is 5th Bust which is slightly scarcer than the 6th bust for this date (I think).

The die numbers query came out of finding the 1878 was die 9, and there is also an 1873 with die 2 - both low numbers in the scheme of things - and I wondered if that made them more or less scarce... Which left me uncertain as to which to keep and which to move on.

Thanks you all for your help!

[Nick]

21 minutes ago, Paddy said:

The die numbers query came out of finding the 1878 was die 9.

I have previously seen an 1878 DN 9 and it was a 5+B die pairing.  There are about 4 times as many 6+B as there are 5+B 1878 shillings.

[declanwmagee]

Somewhere in Tony Clayton's site is a list of which die numbers have been found for which dates, but I can't remember whether he goes down to Davies number detail, and he certainly doesn't go into relative scarcity...

[Stuntman]

Here's the link to the die numbers on Tony Clayton's site that Declan mentions above:

http://www.coins-of-the-uk.co.uk/dieno.html

 

[Mr T]

5 minutes ago, Stuntman said:

Here's the link to the die numbers on Tony Clayton's site that Declan mentions above:

http://www.coins-of-the-uk.co.uk/dieno.html

 

Thanks.

Looks like it's missing the 1863 die number 5 penny.