HKB
one of the numerous Montagu sales a piece realised £2, 10s. I dare say that it passed through one or two hands; but it became mine at last for half-a-sovereign.
I must change the scene. I was never led away in respect to the money of the United Kingdom, not even by patriotism, so far as to find funds and accommodation for every constituent part of every series within these lines. If I were not an Englishman, I should declare unreservedly that a less interesting, more monotonous, and worse executed body of material than the coinages of England, Scotland, Ireland, and their dependencies, with certain emphatic exceptions, does not exist. It has asked all my loyalty to overcome an instinctive repugnance to the uncouth abortions struck as currency by our British, Anglo-Saxon, and many of our Anglo-Norman, progenitors. You may contemplate the entire gallery and succession in numismatic books, with autotype reproductions of these caricatures. A heavy proportion of them are barbarous and feeble imitations of Greek, Roman, and mediæval patterns. Perhaps in art and style they resemble most closely the Gaulish and Visigothic series. If we reserve one or two types of Offa of Mercia and Alfred the Great, the commonest are the best, because they were struck under the authority of sovereigns, whose power was established. I put to myself the question at a very early stage, how many representatives was it necessary for me to assemble before me of these classes or schools of production? The answer is readable in the presence of fifty or sixty Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans; and I have no courage to swell their ranks. When I look at them, I can find nothing to justify the cost of their maintenance but the weak little sentiment, that these pieces of gold, silver, copper, or tin passed from hand to hand, when the part, where I am a dweller, was a dark, swampy forest, with a few squalid huts dotted here and there, and that one or two of these bits of money may have been in the pouch of Cymbeline, or Krause (vulgo Carausius) or Alfred. In fact, I have a silver penny of the royal Cake-Burner, which weighs two grains more than any other known; it was Colonel Murchison's; but possibly it had previously belonged to the king himself!
Seriously speaking, our native currencies acquired their value and rank only, when the French and Low Country types began to attract notice and emulation; and I should be satisfied with drawing the line at Edward III. as a commencing point and at Anne as a finishing one. The view is by no means original; I have met with several, who averted their eyes from the peculiarly humble and uncouth beginnings of the British people in this way; and the late Mr Montagu parted long before his death, on the ground of their dearth of interest, with the whole of his Hanoverian collections.
Between these extremities there is undeniably a rich field for choice. Numismatists have always, I apprehend, regarded me as a heretic, for the simple reason that I attached, in the absence of some specific ground, no importance to mint-marks or to minor differences. I have accustomed myself to take a coin in my hand, and estimate it on its merits. I am able to see what ruler or State it represents, its period, its style, its value. It may bear on its face a striking portrait of some illustrious personage--a potent sovereign, a distinguished soldier, a great lady--of whom the lineaments are nowhere else extant. It may be money of necessity, narrating to us, as fully as it can, a tragic or a noble story. It may be the first piece which was struck by a famous individual or place, or the last--perchance out of church or college plate with the original border of a dish remaining to commemorate a crisis. All these and other similar characteristics are broad and clear. But I have always been impatient of the stress laid by experts on an inverted letter in the legend, an added or omitted dot, or some such fantastic and puerile refinement.