Next
club meeting Monday 5th December
2015.
The
activities will be as follows:
1.
The
main feature will be a mini coin fair. Tables will not be charged for & there
will be a collective members table.
2.
A
coin quiz
3.
Members
to bring along one or two items that for some reason are considered special
(e.g. recent acquisition, a long sought after piece, an unusual find, an oddity
etc.). A brief written explanation as to why the piece is special to you.
4.
Christmas
buffet!
Meetings are held
at the Abbey Baptist Church, Abbey Square, commencing at 7.00 p.m.
Notices
·
Please continue thinking about Short Talks for
January, and Auction lots for March!
November Meeting
The speaker for November was Stephen Alexander who
gave an illustrated talk about fakes and forgeries, with special emphasis on
Roman coins, after finding an As of Claudius in an Italian railway yard. But he
had always found fakes interesting. Ever since silver coins were invented,
people have been faking them, even the very first coins, from Lydia, were being
faked using a precious metal plating on a copper core
within a few decades of their introduction.
In honour of
this, Michael brought along a part of his ‘Black Museum’ – some of the fakes
and forgeries he has had through his hands since he’s been in the trade.
Not all fakes are intended to deceive. Sovereigns were
made in
Modern fakes, intended to fool the collector, are a
daily hazard. They come in all shapes & sizes and degrees of skill. The
easiest to dismiss are the “tourist” fakes offered all over the world. To
anyone who has seen an original they are obvious, but the unwary are caught. Do
not let your critical faculties desert you on holiday! Like the Green Cross
Code, the advice is “Stop, Look, Listen, and Think”.
The more serious fakes are those designed to fool the
collector. They have been around for centuries and some are collectable in
their own right. Many of the Renaissance medallions, which were probably
designed to fill the demand for classical coins, often have impossible
combinations of obverse and reverse. As classical copies, many are just
fantasies. There were many very good craftsmen in the 19th & 20th
century who produced fakes that would deceive even the
best scrutiny. One of the more dangerous historical fakers was Becker. He
carved the dies, very skilfully, struck them often on blanks made from old
silver and artificially aged them.
But
these days fakes from China, especially in the Roman series, are exceptionally
difficult to identify. There are several on-line forums which list them. There
were, more interestingly, contemporary forgeries, designed to fool the unwary
merchant or consumer, but some contemporary imitations cannot of been designed to deceive anyone, and must have been
simply a means of trading.
Imperial Roman mints produced staggering quantities of
coins numbering in the 10’s and 100’s of millions each year. Forgery was always
a problem: contemporary forgeries, or counterfeits, were produced for: 1)
straight cheating; 2) semi-official local production; 3) money of necessity
when supplies were interrupted and, possibly, 4) by the Army. Effectively, the Army’s
economics ran the
“An
As of Claudius, based on a Lugdunum (Lyons) mint
design. Struck by the Roman Army in the South of
In considering counterfeits, why and where they were
made, it is necessary to try to establish costs in Roman times and how these
costs related to coin production. Very relevant to the counterfeit story is the
cost of transport. When the Romans first occupied Britannia in 43AD the weight
of coinage needed to pay 20,000 legionaries & auxiliaries was prodigious
and transporting it a real headache. The Romans were a very practical people. Given the
enormous costs incurred in transportation, is it unlikely that, somewhere in the
Empire, perhaps in Cornwall, they mined, smelted, cast into ingots huge
quantities of copper and then transported it to Rome where it was melted, cast
into blanks, struck and then transported all the way back to Britannia?
There is no one reason why coins were counterfeited.
At different times, with different economic drivers, and particularly the
isolation of the border regions, counterfeits were produced for several
different reasons. Stephen felt sure that the army was very active in official
& unofficial minting. Hoard finds show that the fakes must have been widely
accepted, just like modern £1 coins of which anything up to 5% are forged. If
you get one in your change you don’t care as you know someone else will accept
it.
One of the most celebrated plated coins was produced
towards the end of the Peloponnesian War 431BC-404BC. The authorities in
One real denarius had enough silver to plate 10
counterfeits. When you consider the rate of production, the danger of being
shopped, and the costs of getting the coins unobtrusively into circulation, the
returns were hardly spectacular. A method of producing a silver layer that was
used by the official mints & forgers was pickling. The blanks were pickled
in chemicals which preferentially dissolved the more reactive copper in the
outer layer leaving silver. When struck an acceptable, but temporary, layer of
silver was left on the surface.
Looking at coins generally, some years ago Seaby’s
The Club thanked Stephen for a very interesting
presentation.
Future
Events.
Past Events
In
November 1976 Dr. John Kent gave a talk entitled "Sixty Glorious Years,
the Development and Content of Victorian Medals".
November
1986 saw members hearing a talk on "Tudor Coinage" by Barrie Cook.
Ten
years later in 1996, John Crowley gave a talk on "Primitive
Currencies".
November 2006 had Tim Everson giving a talk entitled
Royal and Rose Farthings of James and Charles I.
Club
Secretary.