Coins and Cavaliers: The Civil War Coin Collection at the Yorkshire Museum

By Tristan Griffin, British Numismatic Society Intern

My name is Tristan Griffin, and I am an intern here at the Yorkshire Museum, working with our civil war coin collection. The British Civil Wars, fought between the royalist ‘cavaliers’ and the parliamentarian ‘roundheads’, with the Scottish covenanters swapping sides half way through, essentially created modern Britain. While the eventual result of the wars was the constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy that we live in today, our ancestors suffered a great deal of violence, dislocation and conflict before that could be achieved.

Image below: Crown of Charles I, minted in a royalist wartime mint in Truro between 1642 and 1643 (YORYM: 2016.357).

Yorkshire between 1642 and 1645 was a land scarred by war, with sieges, raids, looting, atrocities, and even the invasion of the county by massive armies tens of thousands strong. It is little wonder that so many people buried their money under the ground, hoping to recover it in more peaceable times. The goal of my internship is to lay the groundwork for an exhibition here at the museum, one that will use our collection of coins to tell the story of Yorkshire’s experience of the British Civil Wars of 1638-1661.

Of course, before we can do any of that, we have to find out what exactly we have in our collection.

This may seem like a simple task at first, but since we have almost 2,000 coins from the civil wars here at the museum, it is a lot more complicated than it first seems. It becomes even more difficult when you begin working through these thousands of coins, and find out that in many cases the records are confused, mis-sorted, or just plain wrong.

We should expect these problems, given that we have been collecting these coins for the past 200 years, and past practices were not quite up to modern standards. My first job was to look at every single one of these coins, checking it against its documentation to see that it was correct, and counting them to make sure that we actually had everything the records say we do. Needless to say, this took a while.

Image below : An electrotype (extremely accurate copy, mostly produced in the 19th century) half-crown of Charles I, minted in the royalist mint here in York. Note the lion’s skin draped over the British coat of arms, its paws clutching at the royal shield (YORYM : 2016.375).

As historic artefacts, we need to record everything about these coins. Not only what they are made from, or their value, but their weight, their diameter, their design, any chips, worn-away letters or imperfections, how we got them, and, of course, where we actually keep them. All this is needed if the coins are to be usable, not only as a resource for historians, but as components in an exhibition for the general public.

My next post will be about how we take those near-2,000 coins, and use them to chart the progress of the fighting across Yorkshire almost 400 years ago. Read it here.