Celtic coinage is the most intriguing and varied of all the British coins since no one knows specifically for whom, when or where they were produced. To date, over 45,000 of ancient British and Gaulish coins have been discovered in Britain and all of these have been recorded at the Oxford Celtic Coin Index, but…
Introduction The late 18th century is a complicated time from the perspective of collecting tokens insofar as several dealers began to manufacture their own tokens for collectors, i.e. these did not circulate. They doubled and tripled their profits by deliberately producing mules, i.e. mis-matching obverse and reverse dies. They then increased their profits further by…
The shilling (often written as 1s or 1/-) coin was a sub-division of the pre-decimal Irish pound, and was worth 1/20th of a pound. The original issue of the coin from 1928 until 1942 contained 75% silver; thus this Irish coin had a higher content than the equivalent British coin. These earlier coins were noticeably different…
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…
The threepence (3d) (Irish: leath reul) coin was an Irish pre-decimal coin and a great favourite of golfers who often used it as a green marker. There were 4 threepences to a shilling and 80 to an old pound. The Irish name (leath reul) literally meant “half a sixpence” and, unlike many other Irish coins of the time, it…
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…
One of the more difficult aspects of coin collecting is the language barrier one encounters when trying to decipher the legends (text around the edges) of coins. Very few of us speak Latin and truncated Latin still appears on British coins today. As we all know, British coins circulated alongside Irish coins in this country…
The Old Currency Exchange is a specialist dealer and valuer of Irish & GB coins, tokens and banknotes 