As early as the sixteenth century antiquaries and collectors began to be interested in old coins, and consequently some unscrupulous individuals went into business supplying fakes to tempt the unsuspecting or naïve. Some forgeries were never intended for use as cash, however.
#Haven and hearth gilding trial#
Sir John had been producing counterfeit English and Spanish coins, for which he was put on trial for treason. Moulds, pieces of brass, crucibles, as well as chemicals and charcoal, were discovered in the desk of the fort’s commander, Sir John Brockett. In 1603 a coining operation was uncovered at Duncannon Fort in Ireland. Some ‘coiners’, as forgers were sometimes called, were already wealthy individuals. This meant that forgery operations generally involved more than one person, as well as some initial financial outlay, and so they were not the last resort of a poor man or woman with no other way of getting cash. It required access to supplies of metals, a furnace or crucible, and various other bits and pieces of equipment, including dies or moulds on which had been engraved a passable copy of the coin to be reproduced. In other cases, people forged coins purely and simply for monetary gain. After Claudius’s invasion in AD 43 the Roman army itself may have been responsible for much of this ‘irregular’ coinage, which was sometimes tolerated by governments as being something of a necessary evil. In Roman Britain this happened to such an extent that at some periods there may have been as many fake coins in circulation as real ones. Sometimes, when supplies of the smaller denomination coins were inadequate, unofficial production took place to make up the shortfall. Twelve fake coins from the reign of Charles I found in Wales have been reported to PAS Cymru since 2009, far outweighing those of any other monarch, but the great majority are much older than this and date from the period of Roman occupation, from the first to the early fifth century AD.Ĭounterfeit coins were made for several reasons in the past. In ‘mint’ condition it would have looked sound enough to the untrained eye, but its real value would have been well below the two shillings and sixpence (or one-eighth of a pound) that the half crown represented. A half crown is a silver coin, but Mr Mensikov’s example gave itself away as a fake because corrosion revealed it to have only a thin coating of silver over a copper alloy core. One of the fakes was a Charles I half crown, discovered by Mr Nick Mensikov at Miskin, Rhondda Cynon Taf. Many more were described as ‘irregular’ and therefore also produced under suspicious circumstances. In 2015, out of 679 coins reported, seven were judged by experts at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales to be contemporary counterfeits.
#Haven and hearth gilding portable#
Occasionally, metal detectorists who unearth coins and report them to the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Wales (PAS Cymru), are told that what they have found is not what it seems to be – it is in fact a fake.
Your answer will hopefully be, “no, of course not!”, but would you be able to spot one if you saw one?Īccording to the Royal Mint, just over 2.5% of the £1 coins circulating in 2015 were counterfeit, so how many of us have unwittingly broken the law by handling fake money? But far from being a modern problem, you may be surprised to learn that counterfeit coins have been causing headaches for the authorities for thousands of years – for as long as we have been using money, in fact.
The corroded base metal core can clearly be seen through the thin silver plating.
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