Mint and provenance marks on British milled coins

Almost everything is a Tower coin

Start from the default, because on milled coinage the default covers most of the ground: British milled coins were struck at the Royal Mint — at the Tower of London until 1810, at Tower Hill until 1968, and at Llantrisant since. A milled coin with no mark at all is not a mystery. It is the normal case.

That is a real difference from hammered coinage, where a dozen mints operated at once and the mint is genuinely in question on every coin. From 1662 the answer is the Royal Mint unless something on the coin says otherwise, and the small number of things that do say otherwise are all on this page.

So the useful question for a milled coin is not “which mint?” but “is this mark a mint at all?” — and much of the time it is not.

Marks that record the metal, not the mint

Between the Restoration and the middle of the eighteenth century, coins struck from bullion supplied by a particular source carried a mark saying so. The Royal Mint was acknowledging where the metal came from — a company, a mine, or in two famous cases a naval prize — and the mark is a statement about the silver or gold, not about the building the coin was made in.

Every one of these coins is a Tower coin. The mark is worth knowing because it dates the issue precisely and because some of them are scarce and valuable, but it identifies no mint whatsoever.

The rest follow the same logic. Plumes are the Prince of Wales’s feathers and mean Welsh silver. Roses mean silver from the west of England. Roses and plumes together mean the Company for smelting down lead with pitcoal and seacoal, which mixed the two sources. SSC in the angles of the reverse is the South Sea Company; WCC is the Welsh Copper Company; EIC is the East India Company. The elephant and the elephant and castle are both the Africa Company, whose badge that was.

The 1696 recoinage: five letter mints

The one period when British milled coinage really was struck at more than one place in England. The Great Recoinage of 1696 replaced the entire worn and clipped hammered silver circulation, and the Tower could not do it alone, so five temporary country mints were opened. Their coins carry a single letter below the bust.

All five appear on William III silver dated 1696 and 1697, on halfcrowns, shillings and sixpences depending on the mint. These are genuine mint marks in the full sense: the letter names where the coin was struck.

Note the y/Y point, because it is exactly the kind of distinction that gets flattened by accident. A capital Y and a minuscule y were two different punches used at York, and treating them as one merges two marks into a single entry showing the wrong shape for one of them. The same is true of Edward VI’s Canterbury silver, which carries a capital T and a minuscule t as different marks.

Edinburgh, Soho, Heaton and King’s Norton

Sovereigns: the branch mint letter

The one place a modern British coin routinely names a mint other than London. From 1871 the Royal Mint operated branch mints across the empire, striking sovereigns from locally mined gold, and each marked its coins with a single letter.

Where to look: on a St George reverse the letter is in the exergue, below the horse’s hind hooves and above the date. On a shield reverse it is below the wreath. It is small, and on a worn coin it is easy to miss entirely.

A sovereign with no letter is a London sovereign. The branch mint issues vary enormously in scarcity — the 1918 Bombay sovereign was struck for one year only, and some Ottawa dates are genuinely rare — so the letter is often the single most valuable piece of information on the coin.

Every recorded mark, reign by reign

The full milled catalogue: 24 marks that name a single mint, and 12 that record the bullion instead. Both are listed together in the reign tables below, with the bullion marks flagged so they cannot be read as mints.