The North Yorkshire Moors Collection of British Coins

The earliest English coin-related piece to bear a date of any kind:


‘Perkin Warbeck’, medallic jeton, 1494, in silver, issued for the Lower Exchequer and struck at the Tower mint, ‘mm’. lion, crowned arms of England and France quarterly, flanked by crowned lis and crowned rose, all within 5-arc tressure, domine salvvm fac regem, rev. mani techel phares and date, crown above lis, lion and rose, all within 4-arc tressure, 3.78g/6h (Dykes/Archibald, BNJ 2020 [forthcoming], 10, this piece; N 1758). Good fine, extremely rare; perhaps 13-15 specimens known, this only the fourth to have been offered at auction in the last 40 years, with an unbroken provenance dating back to 1781 £2,000-£3,000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The North Yorkshire Moors Collection of British Coins.

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Collection

Provenance: I. Foster Collection, Gerard Auction (London), 3-4 May 1781, lot 65; M.C. Tutet Collection, Gerard Auction (London), 18-21 January 1786, lot 27; E. Hodsoll Collection; S. Tyssen Collection, Sotheby Auction, 12 April-31 May 1802, lot 3093; T. Dimsdale Collection, Sotheby Auction, 6-22 July 1824, lot 490; T. Thomas Collection, Part I, Sotheby Auction, 23 February-4 March 1844, lot 270; Sir Henry Russell Collection, Sotheby Auction, 18-23 February 1850, lot 305; J. Gibbs Collection; J.G. Murdoch Collection, Part I, 31 March-4 April 1903, lot 402; Lord Grantley Collection, Part IV, Glendining Auction, 20-1 April 1944, lot 1877; R. Carlyon-Britton Collection; SCMB November 1959 (7004); with G. Hearn July 1972; SNC January 1973 (280).


For over 250 years, since its first publication by the antiquary George Vertue in 1735 as ‘a silver coin struck in Flanders, said to be by order of [Margaret] the Duchess of Burgundy for the use of Perkin Warbeck’, these pieces were associated with the pretender Warbeck (c. 1474-99), who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, brother of Edward V. Recent study, by the late Marion Archibald and by David Dykes, has shown that the jetons, all from the same pair of dies, utilise punches from contemporary angels and groats struck at the Tower with mm. pansy. The reverse legend, mani techel phares (’counted, weighed [and] divided’), define the functions of the Lower Exchequer, the royal officers in titular charge of which in 1494 were Sir William Stanley, Lord Chamberlain of the Household, and Giles, Lord Daubeney, an influential member of Henry VII’s inner circle. Dykes suggests that the fall from grace of Stanley, implicated as he was in the Malines plot of autumn 1494 and who was subsequently executed on 16 February 1494/5, and the fact that Daubeney took over Stanley’s office on 7 February 1494/5, coupled with Daubeney’s association with the goldsmith Bartholomew Reed, effective head of the Mint, prompted the production of a souvenir d’emploi for Daubeney on his appointment as Lord Chancellor