● Next Meeting Status:
Cancelled
● Host Society for the
BANS 2011 Congress
held in Southport
Secret Marks on Merchant Countermarked Silver Coins
Privy Marks as Security
Society Member Eric Hodge is well known for his researches into the series of countermarked
silver coins issued by a number of factories and mills in the years around the end
of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and he has had a
number of articles and updates published in Spink’s Numismatic Circular. His latest
work consists of a well-
The place of the countermarked coins in the currency market was tightly circumscribed: too low a face value and the coins would be melted; too high a face value and they could be profitably counterfeited. To enable the issuers to readily detect counterfeits and thus avoid loss on redemption, secret, or privy, marks were included in the countermarking process. By their nature, these were not obvious and, in the absence of records, can really only be determined by the examination of a number of specimens. Given the rarity of most countermarked pieces, this is not an easy task.
● Read Eric Hodge’s brief guide to
Merchant Countermarked Dollars.
Click here to open the page
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