The Prestbury Civil War Hoard
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THE PRESTBURY CIVIL WAR HOARD KEITH SUGDEN AND IAN JONES Introduction A hoard of silver coins dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together with one gold coin, was found on 15 June 2004 by Jason Scott while digging footings for a barn conver- sion at Prestbury, Cheshire. Hoards of this period from the North West of England are un- usual (none was listed by Besly),1 especially those including gold coinage, and the overwhelming majority of reported fi nds are from the more prosperous Midlands and Yorkshire. The latest coins in the present hoard have the initial mark Triangle-in-Circle (in use 1641–43), and it is likely that the turbulent events of the Civil War of 1642–49 led to the hoard’s deposition. The majority of the coins have since been sold at auction by the fi nder (Dix Noonan Webb sale 68, 12 December 2005, lots 1–153), after being declared Treasure at a coroner’s inquest on 19 October 2004 and returned to him. A brief summary of the hoard (2004 T349) was included in Treasure Annual Report 2004.2 Historical background The Royalist High Sheriff of Cheshire, Thomas Legh, is known to have owned the land on which the hoard was found; he lived at Adlington Hall, Cheshire, some 3 km north of Prestbury and 20 km south of Manchester. In September 1642, the Earl of Derby laid siege to Manchester on behalf of the king, and it is possible the hoard is associated with these events; the people of Manchester and the surrounding towns were generally Parliamentary supporters, and between 23 and 26 September 1642 ‘country people from the surrounding areas fl ooded into the town [Manchester] to defend it.’3 The assault was unsuccessful. It is often diffi cult, and frequently unwise, to tie depositions of hoards to specifi c events, and the Prestbury hoard is no exception to this rule. Nonetheless, although personal circum- stances of which we can know nothing, may well have caused the owner of the signifi cant sum of some £54 to bury his money, it is likely from the initial mark of the latest coins that they were deposited at a time of considerable upheaval in the locality. Despite this, there were no hoards closing with initial mark Triangle-in-Circle (that is, from the early part of the Civil War) and originating in the North West of England known to Besly,4 and only one terminating with an earlier initial mark (Congleton, 1956: closing mark Star; £18, all gold), as compared with eight hoards from this period recorded by him from Yorkshire. The hoard The hoard consisted of one gold coin, a laurel of James I (third coinage, fourth bust, initial mark Trefoil), and 1,359 silver coins (together with six forgeries), contained within a cylindri- cal earthenware jar, found in six fragments and thought to be of local manufacture in the North West Purple tradition (see Appendix 2). Gold coins occur in about one-third (10/32) of Acknowledgements. The authors would like to thank Edward Besly, of the National Museum of Wales, for generously providing a copy of his 1987 monograph, and for his initial comments. The illustrations on Pl. 3 have been provided by Dix Noonan Webb. 1 Besly 1987. 2 Treasure Annual Report 2004, 191–2, no. 477. 3 Pendlebury 1983. 4 Besly 1987. Keith Sugden and Ian Jones, ‘The Prestbury Civil War hoard’, British Numismatic Journal 82 (2012), 133–45. ISSN 0143–8956. © British Numismatic Society. 134 SUGDEN AND JONES hoards ending in initial mark Triangle-in-Circle noted by Besly, usually as a small number of coins, although occasionally they form the bulk of the hoard (e.g. Reading 1934, Painswick 1941).5 Of the silver coins, the largest denomination was the halfcrown, of which there was one of James I and 44 of Charles I, together with one Scottish 30 shillings (which circulated as a halfcrown in England); there were no European ‘dollars’. The majority of the coins were Elizabethan sixpences (528) and shillings (219), with smaller contributions of Stuart sixpences and shillings, and some pieces dating from the mid-sixteenth century (see Appendix 1). Tudor coins were slightly heavier than their Stuart counterparts (by 3.3 per cent),6 a gain that was largely negated by the degree of wear and clipping on the coins in the hoard. Only one provin- cial coin was found – a sixpence of Aberystwyth – and no ‘milled’ pieces, either by Mestrell or Briot (excluding Scottish coins); however, Royalist mints were only just starting production at this period. As usual, there were a few Scots and Irish coins, the Scottish circulating at 12s. Scots = 1s. English (leaving the Scottish merk of 13s. 4d. Scots to be worth 13½d. English), and the Irish coins circulating at 1s. Irish = 9d. English. There were 35 Scottish coins (2.5 per cent of the total by number) and 26 Irish (1.9 per cent). Six of the coins were suffi ciently inter- esting to merit illustrating: a shilling of James I with initial mark Mullet over Key on obverse, omitting the intervening Bell mark (933; Pl. 3, 1); a sixpence of James I of 1615, with initial mark Tun over Cinquefoil on obverse (1011; Pl. 3, 2); a sixpence of James I of 1616 (over 1615), the date 1616 being previously unrecorded (1012; Pl. 3, 3); two very rare shillings of Charles I, initial mark Harp, with plume above the shield on the reverse (1085–6; Pl. 3, 4–5); and a shilling of Charles I from an obverse of Briot’s hammered coinage muled with an ordinary Tower reverse (1238; Pl. 3, 6). The size of the hoard is noteworthy. The median number of coins in hoards ending in Triangle-in-Circle noted by Besly that had suffi cient detail for analysis (23) was 170, and the median value was £8 5s. 0d., whereas the Prestbury hoard contained 1,366 coins with a face value of £53 17s. 9½d.7 Clearly this represents a substantial sum of money, at a time when the total estate of the Vicar of Bolton (who died shortly after the Bolton Massacre of 1644) was recorded for probate as £176 17s. 10d.,8 and a day’s pay offered to a cavalryman was 2s. 6d.9 Percentages of clipped coins The proportions of clipped coins are worthy of note. In discussing the state of the currency, Besly observed that ‘virtually all of Elizabeth’s silver coins had been clipped and many of James I. Only in the North are Charles’ coins clipped in any quantity, perhaps because of the area’s remoteness and poor enforcement of the law.’10 He rightly pointed out the diffi culty of identifying clipped, as opposed to poorly struck, coins, but to an experienced observer a high proportion of the coins from the Prestbury hoard have been clipped, though by no means all of Elizabeth’s pieces and none of the earlier coins of Edward VI, Mary or Philip and Mary. Perhaps these earlier pieces were becoming unfamiliar and were subject to greater scrutiny. TABLE 1. Percentages of clipped coins in the Prestbury hoard 2s. 6d. 1s. 6d. Elizabeth I – 28.6 30.9 James I (one coin) 29.4 23.4 Charles I 4.6 15.9 15.5 5 Besly 1987, 80–6. 6 Challis 1978, 321–5. 7 Besly 1987, 116. 8 Pendlebury 1983, 3. 9 Besly 1987, 55. 10 Besly 1987, 65. THE PRESTBURY CIVIL WAR HOARD 135 TABLE 2. Percentages of clipped coins in the Breckenbrough Hoard11 2s. 6d. 1s. James I – 37.9 Charles I 19.8 27.7 Weights Two summaries of the weights of the silver coins have been prepared (see Appendix 1). The fi rst (A) shows the weights of the coins as an overall average (1), the numbers of the coins found (2), and the average weights as a percentage of the standard at which they were issued (3). As expected, this table shows a steady drop in the percentage of the weight standard as the coin gets older, though the average weight of the Elizabethan shillings and sixpences is slightly greater than those of James, and this is emphasised by summary (B), which shows the average weights as a percentage of the standard pertaining in 1640. Thus the weight of the silver of Elizabeth is still largely comparable with that of the Stuart coinage, and this no doubt accounts for its continued presence in currency sixty or more years later. The same does not apply to the groats of Mary, which are considerably worn, as a similar summary (Table 3) for them shows. Thus the early groats are seen to have lost about one-third of their weight, though they are not obviously clipped; whether they circulated at face value at this period is unknown. TABLE 3. Weights of Mary groats Mean wt. No. of coins Mean wt. as percentage Mean wt. as percentage of standard of standard in 1640 1.37 g 30 68.3 66.4 The average weight of all undamaged (that is, not pierced or broken) coins in Table 4 is similar to the average weights of coins in hoards ending in initial mark Triangle-in-Circle noted by Cook.12 TABLE 4. Mean weights of undamaged coins Hoard Sixpence Shilling Halfcrown Elizabeth I James I Charles I Elizabeth I James I Charles I Charles I Revesby 2.70 2.74 3.04 5.57 5.27 5.84 Wortwell 2.39 2.68 2.93 5.69 5.64 5.89 14.88 Dersingham 5.66 5.69 5.90 Ryhall 2.69 2.77 2.94 5.38 5.70 6.01 14.98 Wroughton 2.71 2.85 2.98 5.55 5.73 6.01 14.91 Tidenham 2.58 2.59 2.82 5.25 5.42 5.83 14.61 Prestbury 2.68 2.77 2.97 5.57 5.61 5.87 14.87 Conclusions The Prestbury Hoard represents a large deposit of coinage from the early phase of the English Civil War, and confi rms Besly’s comment that clipping of the coinage was more prevalent in the north of the country, perhaps because of its remoteness.