Item 1964/1 - Letter from Peter Spufford

1 item, paper

Letter from Peter Spufford, in manuscript, one folio (recto & verso), dated 9 February 1964, providing two pieces of evidence on die-output. In the first, over eighteen months at the Bruges mint in 1468-1469, he says that over 2000 dies, or over 1000 pairs of dies, produced less than 5,500,000 coins at a rate of not much more than 5000 coins per pair. In the second piece of evidence, from the Ghent mint in 1492, he has the number of dies used over three months – thirty-two dozen (384) – but he figures for total mint output cover the whole fifteen months of the mint account; depending upon how one makes their calculations output per pair of dies varies between 2000 and 10,000, perhaps "too broad to be much use".