Grading English hammered coins

Why hammered coins are graded differently

English hammered coinage runs from the seventh century to 1662. For all of that time a coin was made the same way: a blank was cut from a hammered sheet of silver, laid on a fixed lower die, topped with an upper die, and hit with a hammer. Every step of that is done by eye and by hand, and the coin records all of it.

The consequence for grading is that two coins in identical condition can look very different. One was struck squarely with a fresh die on a round flan; the other was struck off-centre with a die that had been in use for six months, on a blank that was slightly too small. Neither has been in anybody’s pocket. Grade is a statement about wear — about metal lost after the coin left the mint — and on a hammered coin you have to see past a great deal of noise to find it.

That is why the useful description of a hammered coin is usually three facts rather than one: the grade, the quality of the strike, and the state of the flan. A dealer’s “VF, well struck, full round flan” is not padding. It is three independent things, and a coin can be good at any one and poor at the others.

Groat, Mary (1553–4), mintmark Pomegranate · S.2492

Striking weakness is not wear

This is the distinction to learn first, because getting it wrong in either direction costs money. Weakness and wear both remove detail. They do not remove it the same way.

Tilt the coin under a single light source and turn it. Wear catches the light as a flat, slightly shiny plateau. A weak strike does not — it stays matte and low, and the surrounding surface is undisturbed.

The flan: full, clipped, chipped, creased

The blank is the second independent axis. Hammered blanks were cut by hand, so an irregular outline is normal and not a fault. What is a fault is metal that has been removed or damaged since.

• Full flan — the whole design and the whole legend are on the coin, with the beaded border complete or nearly so. On most reigns this is uncommon and it carries a real premium. A full round flan can be worth more than a grade.
• Clipped — silver cut from the edge with shears, usually for its bullion value, which is why the practice was a capital offence. It shows as a straight chord across a curved edge and it takes the legend with it. Clipping is damage; note it separately and say how much of the legend survives.
• Chipped or cracked — the flan split at the edge, usually from being struck cold or from a stress point in the sheet. Common on the larger silver, and a small edge crack on a groat is a much smaller deal than the same on a penny.
• Creased or bent — thin silver folds. A coin that has been folded and flattened again shows a bright line across the face and often a hairline crack. This is usually the single most value-destroying thing on an otherwise good hammered coin.
• Double-struck or shifted — the coin moved between blows, so the legend doubles. Interesting rather than damaging, and on some coins collectable in its own right.

Where wear shows first

The order is the same as on any coin — the highest relief goes first — but on a hammered portrait the high points are in specific and slightly unexpected places, because the portrait is a facing bust rather than a profile for most of the series.

On the reverse, most of the series is some form of cross. The centre of the cross and the pellets in the quarters are the high points; the outer legend, again, is the last thing to go. A worn reverse cross on a sharp obverse is very often a strike issue rather than a wear one, because the cross sits opposite the bust and the two compete for the same metal.

The grades, and what they mean here

British collectors grade adjectivally — Fine, Very Fine, Extremely Fine — and dealers slice those finer with prefixes (nVF for nearly, gVF for good, meaning better than). Slabbed coins arrive with a Sheldon number instead, and CGS UK uses a scale of its own that runs to 100. They are not interchangeable, and the table below is how this catalogue reconciles them.

Two warnings about that table, both of which matter more on hammered coins than on milled. The numbers are advisory: they exist to sort a collection and to pick comparable auction lots, and dealers disagree by several points on any of them. And the Sheldon scale was designed for early American large cents — machine-struck coins with consistent strikes — so it describes a hammered penny only loosely. The adjective is the real grade; the number is a filing system.

Faults that are not grade

Each of these is recorded separately from the grade, because each affects value independently and a single adjective cannot carry them.

• Porosity and pitting — a rough, granular surface from centuries in the ground. Very common on detector finds. It does not remove design detail the way wear does, but it changes how the coin looks entirely, and heavily porous coins sell at a large discount to their apparent grade.
• Pecking — small test marks cut into the surface, usually with a knife, by somebody checking the metal was silver all the way through. Genuinely period, extremely common on late Anglo-Saxon and Norman pennies, and expected rather than disqualifying.
• Cleaning — the big one. Harshly cleaned silver has a bright, lifeless surface and fine parallel hairlines under a glass. It is irreversible and it is heavily penalised. Old cabinet toning is the opposite: it is desirable, it took a century to form, and it should never be removed.
• Tooling and smoothing — detail re-cut or fields smoothed with a tool to improve the look. This is misrepresentation rather than conservation, and a tooled coin is worth a fraction of an untooled one. Look for detail that is sharper than its neighbours and for lines that do not match the die’s own.
• Mounted or holed — a coin that was jewellery. A filled mounting mark is often visible as a slightly different colour at the edge.

Groat, Mary (1553–4), mintmark Pomegranate · S.2492

How to write it down

The description a hammered coin deserves is short and has four parts, in this order: grade, strike, flan, faults. For example — “gVF, well struck, full round flan, light porosity”, or “F, weak on the crown, clipped with about two-thirds of the legend, otherwise sound”.

That is the shape this catalogue records too. A coin carries one grade from the ladder above, with the strike, the flan and any faults written into the notes where they belong — rather than being smuggled into the grade, where the next person cannot tell them apart. If you also know the mint, that goes in as its own fact: it is worked out from the initial mark and the legend, and there is a separate guide to doing that and a tool that will do most of it for you.