Exchequer: Treasury of the Receipt: Dies for Coins

E 29

?1353-?1547

This series contains 192 dies used in the production of silver coins in the medieval and early modern period which came to the Public Record Office from the Exchequer Treasury of Receipt.

The bulk of these dies were issued from the Exchequer for use in various royal and episcopal mints in England, and were defaced and returned there when withdrawn from use. Of the English dies, 144 can be identified fully and 8 with less certainty; a further 39 can be identified only by denomination and type of die. The identifiable dies were used by the royal mints of York, London and Canterbury and the ecclesiastical mints of York and Durham. A further eight dies were used in one of the two ecclesiastical mints, but cannot be more closely identified.

The final piece in the series is a leather pouch containing 121 whole or fragmentary counterfeit coins, all copies of the groat of 1500-1502.

The current arrangement of the series dates from 1938, when Derek Allen of the British Museum re-sorted and re-numbered the dies, then 192 in number, working apparently from an earlier numbered arrangement of which no record survives. Allen's list, published in the British Numismatic Journal, itemised 154 dies (41 obverse and 113 reverse) on which enough of the engraved surface survived to make some identification reasonably certain. He placed together at the end of his list 38 dies which he regarded as too badly worn to be identified.

Allen's listing served as the principal finding-aid to the coin dies in this series for over 50 years. The dies were re-examined and re-listed by Yvonne Harvey in 1995-1997, in the light of more recent research. Allen's numbering has been followed for E 29/1/1-154, and the 38 additional dies have been sorted and numbered as E 29/1/155-192.

Public Record(s)

French and Latin

193 coins

Many of the 66 obverse dies in this series bear the head of the sovereign, and the 126 reverse dies a design based on the cross. The dies also reveal the effects of constant hammering during the coin-making process.

Topics

Archives and libraries

Religions

The survival of this accumulation was almost certainly accidental; normal practice appears to have been for a die which had gone out of use to be destroyed. Most of the dies now in this series appear to have been stored for several centuries in the Chapel of the Pyx. They remained there when the bulk of the record material was removed from the chapel to the Public Record Office in the first half of 1859. Subsequently, they were held in a chest of equipment connected with the trial of the pyx; this chest (now E 27/3) was moved to the PRO in the early 1860s, and it was probably at that point that the dies now in E 29 came into the PRO's care. A total of 188 dies, which remained in the Chapel of the Pyx after the transfers of records and chests to the PRO, were transferred to the British Museum in 1914. Only 34 are now extant, the others having been destroyed by bomb damage in the Second World War.