Item 1961/1 - Three letters from Herbert Schneider

3 items, paper

Three letters of Herbert Schneider:
(a) typescript, two pages on two folios (recto only), dated from London on 26 May 1961, underscoring the difficulties in determining die output for gold coins. Although it is possible to come up with a rough idea of the number of dies, and documents sometimes provide reliable figures for the amount of bullion processed into coin, there is typically no indication of the different proportions accorded to different denominations. In addition, after a king's death, serviceable dies were often decommissioned, which potentially distorted the figures, especially if the issue were small. HS guesses that an angel coin-die would have produced 6000-8000 coins in the fifteenth century and perhaps 10,000 under Charles I, but fears that there is insufficient documentary basis for anything more than very approximate estimates.
(b) typescript, one folio (recto & verso), dated [from Luxembourg?] on 7 June 1961, agreeing that the reign of Richard III is an appropriate one for research on die output because the angel coinage was not too large and the coins rare enough that they are typically illustrated in auction catalogues, because the half-angel coinage was negligible and because the reign was long enough to offset the potentially distorting impact of factors such as accidental breakage. He notes that the forthcoming publication of Winstanley and Potter on the coinage of Henry VII is likely to be suggestive and recommended getting in touch with Potter. About the discarding of dies at the end of reigns, HS states that "there is no hard and fast rule". Sometimes, he says, "the old dies were clearly scrapped", but on other occasions they remained in use even after the coronation of the new king until new ones could be brought into service. In closing, he mentions the possibility of dining with IS and confesses that he is "rather anxious" to ask him about "Mater Briot's activities in Scotland".
(c) typescript, one folio (recto & verso), dated from Zug on 19 August 1961, writing that information from [H. G.] Stride indicates that there are "no records at the Mint which would allow us to establish even a vague figure of the number of angel dies used during the reign of Charles", but Stride did note that a pair of dies for a gold coin of angel size would have normally produced only 2000-2500 coins in that period. HS reports that he has completed his record of angel dies during the time of Charles I, finding 22/23 obverse and 21 reverse, but finding it odd that there should be as many obverse dies as reverse.