Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/77

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
BRITISH COMMERCE.
75

There is also a copper farthing of Cromwell's, with a somewhat different device on the reverse.

To this period likewise belong a few of the Pontefract coins, or tokens, which were issued after the king's death, in the name of Charles II.

For Scotland, James I. coined sovereigns of gold, crowns, half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences of silver, and also farthings of copper. Ail these Scottish coins, however, bore names indicating a value twelve times greater than that of the corresponding English coin: thus the Scottish half-crown was called a thirty-shilling piece, the farthing a threepenny piece, &c. He also coined both silver and copper money for Ireland, of the intrinsic value of about three-quarters of the English; and called in the mixed or base money which had been issued in the time of the rebellion by Elizabeth. Among the Scotch coins of Charles I. is a sovereign or unity of gold, which is very neatly finished, and is supposed to be the production of Nicholas Briot, the mint-mark being a small B. Charles's other Scottish money consists of double crowns, crowns, and half-crowns of gold; half- crowns, shillings, sixpences, nobles or half-marks, forty-penny pieces or quarter marks, two-shilling pieces, and twenty-penny pieces of silver; and farthings, and bothwells, or bodles, of the value of the sixth part of a penny English, of copper. His only Irish coins are some of silver, issued after 1641, by appointment of the lord lieutenant, the Duke of Ormond, and hence known as Ormond money. There are also some Irish halfpence and farthings of copper, of this time, bearing the figure of a king kneeling and playing on a harp, which are supposed to have been struck by the papists during their insurrection in 1642. The coins of Scotland and Ireland in the time of the Commonwealth were the same with those of England.