In the last issue of this magazine, I looked at some of the things that could go wrong in the course of producing a coin using the hammered technique, that is striking a coin between two dies by hand. Now, it is time to look at some other problems with hammered coins and also the sorts of errors that could occur when milling machines began to be used to produce coins.
In Britain, a very few milled coins were first produced for Elizabeth I (Figure 1), but it was not until the middle of the 17th century that milling became predominant, at first with low-value copper farthings and tokens. Since the 17th-century token series represents one of the earliest uses of coin presses to produce an entire coinage, we will draw many of our examples discussed here from this category.
Overstrikes on hammered coins
One category of numismatica that is found both in the hammered and the milled series are
