1643 double tournois warin type fleur-de-lis mark?

Started by carpatic, November 05, 2023, 03:12:18 PM

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carpatic

Hi. The "Warin" types of double tournois have many mint marks, with letters under the year or symbols under the bust, but I have found some other types that have cross-like symbols after the year and nothing else, and I could not identify them by looking at Krause.
I attach first my newly purchased coin, then some others that I've just found on the net.
Are they in Krause but maybe I could not match them?
Thanks

Figleaf

The years from 1637, but in particular 1642 and 1643 were even more than usually chaotic for the production of the copper double tournois coins. The government of Louis XIII had bought large quantities of Swedish copper and wanted to turn that into coins in order to help finance the French involvement in the 30 years war (1618-1648).

There was insufficient capacity in official mints to do so. The king (or rather his chief minister, cardinal Richelieu) had ordered a whole new coin system based on the gold Louis d'or in 1640. In 1641 a new silver coinage based on the ecu of 60 sols was introduced. Old coins had to be countermarked with a lily to remain current. The countermarking operation was a failure. When in 1644, Louis XIV revalued the old douzains from 12 deniers Tournois to 15 deniers Tournois, the decree made no difference between coins with or without counterstamp.

Against this background, it is understandable that the copper coinage was outsourced to private parties. In 1637, Isaac Texier got the job. He, in turn, hired sub-contractors Jean Forest and Simon Mathieu. These gentlemen did a bad job. They produced lightweight, badly struck, weakly struck coins with a large number of subtly different dies in improvised mints: Corbeil (A), Feurs (F), Roquemaure (R) as well as in established mints: Lyon (D), Valence (V), Vienne (V with diagonal line). They often carried the control mark ... (1642-1643) under the bust. These are not mint marks. While the private issues were known as "de Warin" (Jean Warin being the director of the Paris mint), he had little or nothing to do with the coins of the private minters. He may have supplied the prototype of the king's portrait and the part within the inner circle on the reverse, though.

Due to decentralised die-making, the cross in front of the legend took different forms. The mint letter was sometimes forgotten. Even the legends differed: some were in Latin, others in French. Other than the different languages, cataloguers take little notice of the differences, presumably because they are more used to a system of making all dies in Paris and only adding the local symbols locally.

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