Introduction: Realising that having an Irish currency equal to English standard weights resulted in a massive drain of silver out of Ireland and, consequently, reducing the amount of coinage in circulation + causing a recession, Edward IV moved towards remedying this by announcing a new (lower intrinsic value) coinage for Ireland in 1467: double-groats (eight…
Introduction: Edward IV was the King of England from 4 March 1461 until 3 October 1470, and again from 11 April 1471 until his death in 1483. He was the first Yorkist King of England and most of the Irish Norman families (most notably, the Fitzgeralds of Desmond and Kildare) seem to have supported him, despite the Lancastrian…
Dublin in the 1650’s Dublin City in the 1650’s was a very different place to that we all know and love today. It was a walled city – with heavily fortified gates at intervals along its perimeter. In 1649, with a Royalist army encamped in the grassy expanse surrounding Rathmines Castle, the Parliamentary commander of…
![17th century Irish tradesmens' tokens - Dublin, Lazey Hill, Nic[holas] Delone, Penny](https://oldcurrencyexchange.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/dublin-lazey-hill-nicholas-delone-penny.jpg?w=220&h=126&crop=1)
Although manufactured and used over 350 years ago, many of these tokens were issued with pretty much the same form of English as we use nowadays, with a few notable exceptions to their alphabet and spelling, e.g. The letter “U” is always represented by the letter “V”, e.g. DVBLIN There was no letter “J” in…
It may come as a bit of a surprise to many that although Celtic coins have not (yet) been discovered in Ireland, there have been a lot of Roman and Anglo-Saxon coins found – especially the latter. Conservative Irish historians have always said the Romans never got here but they rarely even mention the Anglo-Saxons…
In 1722, the ‘hardware’ manufacturer William Wood was granted a patent to produce copper coins to the maximum cash value of up to £108,000 for use in Ireland. At 48 farthings or 24 halfpennies to one silver shilling, this was a lot of ‘loose change’ At 960 farthings or 480 halfpennies to the pound, £108,000 was…
The first locally produced Irish coinage was the so-called Hiberno-Norse coinage which was first minted in Dublin in about 995-7 AD under the authority of Sihtric III (aka Sihtric Silkenbeard), the Norse King of Dublin. There is no evidence for the native Irish producing coins before this, so it is likely that their economy was not coin-based. The…
I am frequently asked the following questions and I openly admit to struggle to answer them adequately – the negative side of being a generalist dealer (constantly buying old attic finds and selling oddments from same), as opposed to being a specialist numismatic expert like so many of my much more knowledgeable customers. Who ordered…
The Old Currency Exchange is a specialist dealer and valuer of Irish & GB coins, tokens and banknotes 