William IIII Penny

Started by Phill Strange, November 09, 2016, 08:02:12 PM

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Phill Strange

Hi!
I've been coin collecting UK coins for 20+ years & always wondered why Penny's from the rein of William IIII are so expensive & few?
I managed to pick up on around a year ago but is damaged & am always on the look out for a F/VF example.
Thanks!

Figleaf

Total mintage of the William IV pennies is about 1.3 million with three dates. For comparison, total mintage with the first three dates of Q Victoria is about 1.6 million while the comparable figure for K George IV is about 8.4 million. That is of course just shifting the question, though.

I haven't found any single reason why there would be so few heavy copper coins minted, so, logically, there may have been a hard to understand complex set of factors at work. One of these may be the weight of the coin: there may have been a shift in demand for pennies because they were thought to be too heavy. However, that does not explain the mintage figures under George IV.

Another reason is people's preoccupation with gold coin production. There was quite a bit of pushing and pulling on the exact weight of sovereigns and a large amount of minting of sovereigns for exports, merely to acquire foreign (especially French) gold coins that contained some silver, while the English gold coins contained practically only copper. The whole process was metal arbitrage, rather than providing the country with coins: it kept the minters busy without increasing the number of coins in circulation. However, production capacity can only be used once, so something else than gold coin production had to be curtailed.

A third reason is mismanagement. In this period, the function of the mintmaster changed from technical and hands-on to an absentee sinecure for cabinet officers who knew nothing of the business and were just looking out for an even more profitable post. The notorious Pistrucci siphoned off important amounts, producing nothing in particular. To prosecute forgers, the Mint employed useless lawyers who left the job to junior people. Parliament kept lowering Mint staff salaries, chasing out good people. The mint bought equipment that proved useless to them. In short, it was almost a miracle it could still produce coins.

These three reasons are by themselves not compelling enough to explain the small mintage of pennies, but taken together, they could well have moved a now anonymous lower mint officer to diminish penny production quietly in order to keep the big whigs :) happy.

Peter
An unidentified coin is a piece of metal. An identified coin is a piece of history.

FosseWay

Quote from: FigleafI haven't found any single reason why there would be so few heavy copper coins minted, so, logically, there may have been a hard to understand complex set of factors at work. One of these may be the weight of the coin: there may have been a shift in demand for pennies because they were thought to be too heavy. However, that does not explain the mintage figures under George IV.

Don't forget that the coppers of George IV had to make up for the total absence of regal issues for the preceding 24 years, and that those regal issues that existed were the cartwheels of 1797. These were unpopular, but also there is likely to have been a desire on the part of the authorities to get them out of circulation quickly so that the coinage was uniform, much as we get gluts of coins today when denominations are resized.