Mint identifier
Choose the reign, find your initial mark among the drawings, and type whatever you can read of the legend. It will tell you which mint the evidence supports — and, just as importantly, when the evidence does not settle on one.
Last updated 6 September 2026
How it decides
Two kinds of evidence, combined rather than chosen between. The legend is the coin naming its own mint — from Edward I’s recoinage of 1279 the reverse of an English penny says where it was struck, and before that it names the moneyer and his town. That is the strongest evidence there is, and it works on a coin with no mark at all. The initial mark is a punch recording which batch of dies the coin came from; some marks belong to exactly one mint, and many were used at four.
Where both are present they are intersected — a Tun with CIVITAS LONDON is London twice over. Where they disagree the legend wins, because it is on the object and the mark tables are a compilation, but the disagreement is reported rather than hidden.
Every answer carries the sentence that produced it. Where the evidence supports four mints, the answer is four mints — the tool will not pick one and present it as a fact.
What this cannot do
Reading the legend off the coin
Type what you can see, stops and all — the matcher strips punctuation and case before comparing, so CIVITAS LINCOL’ and civitas lincol reach the same place. It matches whole words, so a single legible word is often enough and a partial reading costs you nothing.
One deliberate limit: readings shorter than three letters are ignored. The reference tables record a mint reading of S for Shaftesbury, and matched against a legend that finds something in almost every coin ever struck. An unidentified mint is a much smaller harm than a confident wrong one.
For much more on what the Latin actually says and how mint names are abbreviated, see the guide to identifying the mint on a hammered coin. For milled coins, start with the guide to mint and provenance marks — most milled marks are not mints.
The mark, legend and mint-signature tables behind this page are compiled from the reference tables published by Paul A Shields at psdetecting.com, cross-checked against Spink and North. The mint marks on this page are drawn by us rather than copied — the charges themselves are medieval and belong to nobody. Grades are advisory: dealers disagree by several points, and no number here should be read as a valuation.