What is your Unpopular [non-US coin] Numismatic Opinion

[seth77]

I took a few days to ponder on a couple of things regarding the particularities of medieval numismatics (and to an extent Roman 'provincial' too), both sober and while beering:

1. @JeandAcre puts a big emphasis on historical context regarding medieval coins. I agree, medieval coins are probably as close as someone might get to a piece of the illuminating world of manuscripts and a society that, with all its peculiarities and strangeness, is quite similar to our own. At least more similar than Greco-Roman antiquity. And what makes it more similar to us is usually smack down in your face on any petty denier: Christianity. It was also a world extremely rich in texture and partying on one side and bloody conflict on the other. You get in taberna quando sumus and tempus est iocundum and then you get the Albigensian genocide not in a much different way than the 20th century when you have the Jazz and the German expressionism of the Weimar Republic right before Hitler and the holocaust or the early 21st century with russian ballet vs Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol.

BUT.

It is very difficult to date (some) medieval coinage. Which makes putting coins in a historical context VERY difficult. Scarce to rare coinage like the one associated with Berengar de Narbonne who ruled for ca. 40 years (1020ca. to 1066) as Viscount of Narbonne is usually presented as minted just that 1020-1066. An extremely unlikely interval considering a. the scarcity of coinage and b. the coherent aspect of the known material. M. B. Fillon and Poey d'Avant tried to suggest a late period in the rule (maybe the 1060s?) but since then silence has set and everyone seems to be just happy enough to leave it at 1020-1066. What historical context could be tied to a coinage that is unstuck in time for 40+ years? It's like you'd want to discuss historical context for Constantine I coinage without a sequence of types/denominations and any kind of dating of the types. Early types in a reign are irrelevant for later on in a reign. Later types might relate to an earlier event but certainly relate to contemporary needs and issues.

Bottom line: a few-issues coinage considering the material available cannot be considered to be dating for a whole reign of 40+ years. It's not like the mint struck like 100 coins a year in the context of a city like Narbonne (it's just an example). How do you then relate that coin to its historical background?

 

2. Maybe it's not that difficult to date medieval coinage but numismatists don't really bother that much with dating in general. I am big fan of Duplessy and use him as reference especially for French royal coinage. But when doing the 13th century, he presents less info on issues of the early royal denier tournois than the previous authors whom he cites. Should a catalog just be stripped of any info besides the blunt specifications of an item and that's it?

I don't think that's enough and I don't really understand why something as important as dating is so sidelined in medieval catalogs. Considering that notes on dating that have merit and are instrumental to relating coinages to historical contexts have been made by previous scholars, the lack of interest in that aspect of scholarship and the lack of interest in adding to that part of the research makes no sense to me.
 

Edited February 10, 2023 by seth77

[John Conduitt]

1 hour ago, seth77 said:

I took a few days to ponder on a couple of things regarding the particularities of medieval numismatics (and to an extent Roman 'provincial' too), both sober and while beering:

1. @JeandAcre puts a big emphasis on historical context regarding medieval coins. I agree, medieval coins are probably as close as someone might get to a piece of the illuminating world of manuscripts and a society that, with all its peculiarities and strangeness, is quite similar to our own. At least more similar than Greco-Roman antiquity. And what makes it more similar to us is usually smack down in your face on any petty denier: Christianity. It was also a world extremely rich in texture and partying on one side and bloody conflict on the other. You get in taberna quando sumus and tempus est iocundum and then you get the Albigensian genocide not in a much different way than the 20th century when you have the Jazz and the German expressionism of the Weimar Republic right before Hitler and the holocaust or the early 21st century with russian ballet vs Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol.

BUT.

It is very difficult to date (some) medieval coinage. Which makes putting coins in a historical context VERY difficult. Scarce to rare coinage like the one associated with Berengar de Narbonne who ruled for ca. 40 years (1020ca. to 1066) as Viscount of Narbonne is usually presented as minted just that 1020-1066. An extremely unlikely interval considering a. the scarcity of coinage and b. the coherent aspect of the known material. M. B. Fillon and Poey d'Avant tried to suggest a late period in the rule (maybe the 1060s?) but since then silence has set and everyone seems to be just happy enough to leave it at 1020-1066. What historical context could be tied to a coinage that is unstuck in time for 40+ years? It's like you'd want to discuss historical context for Constantine I coinage without a sequence of types/denominations and any kind of dating of the types. Early types in a reign are irrelevant for later on in a reign. Later types might relate to an earlier event but certainly relate to contemporary needs and issues.

Bottom line: a few-issues coinage considering the material available cannot be considered to be dating for a whole reign of 40+ years. It's not like the mint struck like 100 coins a year in the context of a city like Narbonne (it's just an example). How do you then relate that coin to its historical background?

 

2. Maybe it's not that difficult to date medieval coinage but numismatists don't really bother that much with dating in general. I am big fan of Duplessy and use him as reference especially for French royal coinage. But when doing the 13th century, he presents less info on issues of the early royal denier tournois than the previous authors whom he cites. Should a catalog just be stripped of any info besides the blunt specifications of an item and that's it?

I don't think that's enough and I don't really understand why something as important as dating is so sidelined in medieval catalogs. Considering that notes on dating that have merit and are instrumental to relating coinages to historical contexts have been made by previous scholars, the lack of interest in that aspect of scholarship and the lack of interest in adding to that part of the research makes no sense to me.
 

I don't fully understand why Continental medieval coin dating is so poor. For English coins, you can usually get it down to a couple of years. Take the short cross coinage covering 1180-1247. It is all marked 'Henricus' for 2 Henrys, Richard I and John, and the Victorians thought it was all Henry II's. But now, the dates are a lot tighter, split into 8 classes, each of which is split further e.g. Class 1:
1a: 1180
1b1: 1180-1182
1b2: 1182-1185
1c: 1185-1189

So the worst is 4 years, the best is the exact year (and who knows, 4 years might be how long it was produced). This is worked out using hoard evidence, die progression, mules, moneyer names and mint records. I understand that Continental issues were 'immobile' (but so were English pennies e.g. 'Henricus') and regional (but so were English pennies, albeit to a national style).

Even if it is to do with the number of hoards found, it's noticable that the most recent major work dating English short cross pennies was Laurie Asher Lawrence's in 1915 (well before the advert of the metal detector!) and hasn't been hugely changed since, despite a lot of attention being paid to it by such people as North and Mass.

Edited February 10, 2023 by John Conduitt

[seth77]

Henry II is a very good counter-example because he is partially contemporary with Philippe Auguste and he was one of the first (if not the actual first) king of France to try to centralize monetary types and coinage values. His denier parisis of the 1190s is probably the easiest coinage of the period in France to date because his main vassals and acquaintances adopted the coinage around 1191 so we do at least have a terminus post quem for the parisis coinage. In 1204 Philippe is chosen as abbaye laique at Saint Martin de Tours after the land-grab from John Plantagenet and soon after the denier tournois has a parallel journey to the denier parisis as a royal coinage, first at Tours proper, the abbey of Saint Martin followed by the city of Tours, then as an immobilized type at other mints. The main idea is that the coinage on the continent was more complex, with a constant competition between baronial coinage and royal coinage, something that did not happen in England -- at least not to the extent of feudal coinage being the normality rather than the outlier in any French economy from ca. 900 onwards.

Of course that's not enough to justify auction house-like laziness in passing down information. Fillon and Poey d'Avant and Ciani too deal with chronological intervals but most (if not all) of them are ignored in later 20th century catalogs.

Edited February 10, 2023 by seth77

[JeandAcre]

Owing to time constraints (aka real life; a valid distinction from 'auction house-like laziness'), this will be quick, and correspondingly impressionistic.  But both @seth77's and @John Conduitt's observations are resonantly cogent, and correspondingly worthy of something in the way of a response, even under prevailing circumstances.

@John Conduitt's point about the pronounced contrast in the dating of contemporaneous French and English coins is very well taken.  For English coins, from Henry II's reform of 1180 through the reign of Henry III, including Short and Long Cross issues, Stewartby repeatedly cites the remarkable survival of royal primary source material in the Public Records Office (cf. Introduction and Chapter 1, passim). 

I'm more conversant with the operant primary sources in genealogical than numismatic contexts.  But even in terms of royal records, the survival of English primary source documentation is greater than any French or other Continental equivalent, by orders of magnitude. 

Just look at all of the catastrophic damage that the British Isles dodged, relative to the Continent, from the 14th century through WW II.  To list the wars in the interval would be wearisome to anyone paying attention --yours truly included. 

(Meanwhile, I can get some personal traction with the same contrast, lacking access to more than a handful of recent journal articles.  When you don't have it, Guess What? you can't use it.  This isn't about methodology; it's about availability.  In a world reeking of false dichotomies, This Ain't One of 'em.)  

No less impressionistically, I have to think that this documentary survival, in turn, facilitated the dating of Angevin coins, that much more precisely than their Capetian equivalents.  --Granted that, in both cases, hoard evidence is the ultimate arbiter.  The contrast is relative, but, to @John Conduitt's point, dramatic.  

Regarding hoard evidence, I have to resonate with what @seth77 has to say about Duplessy's penchant for not citing it.  One instance leaps to mind: the anonymous deniers and oboles of Marseilles.  Duplessy dates them, as immobilizations, as late as 1243, but without citing the significant hoard mentioned by Boudeau (c. 1914 --cited here from a xerox from a French acquaintance, annoyingly minus the title page).  @seth77, you can continue the trope of 'laziness' from dealers to cataloguers.  I could wish that Duplessy could do more in the way of updating Boudeau, never mind Fillon and Ciani --neither of which I've ever seen, Thank you, online or otherwise.  Right, I'm kind of stuck with what I've got. 

Edited February 11, 2023 by JeandAcre

[John Conduitt]

6 hours ago, JeandAcre said:

Owing to time constraints (aka real life; a valid distinction from 'auction house-like laziness'), this will be quick, and correspondingly impressionistic.  But both @seth77's and @John Conduitt's observations are resonantly cogent, and correspondingly worthy of something in the way of a response, even under prevailing circumstances.

@John Conduitt's point about the pronounced contrast in the dating of contemporaneous French and English coins is very well taken.  For English coins, from Henry II's reform of 1180 through the reign of Henry III, including Short and Long Cross issues, Stewartby repeatedly cites the remarkable survival of royal primary source material in the Public Records Office (cf. Introduction and Chapter 1, passim). 

I'm more conversant with the operant primary sources in genealogical than numismatic contexts.  But even in terms of royal records, the survival of English primary source documentation is greater than any French or other Continental equivalent, by orders of magnitude. 

Just look at all of the catastrophic damage that the British Isles dodged, relative to the Continent, from the 14th century through WW II.  To list the wars in the interval would be wearisome to anyone paying attention --yours truly included. 

(Meanwhile, I can get some personal traction with the same contrast, lacking access to more than a handful of recent journal articles.  When you don't have it, Guess What? you can't use it.  This isn't about methodology; it's about availability.  In a world reeking of false dichotomies, This Ain't One of 'em.)  

No less impressionistically, I have to think that this documentary survival, in turn, facilitated the dating of Angevin coins, that much more precisely than their Capetian equivalents.  --Granted that, in both cases, hoard evidence is the ultimate arbiter.  The contrast is relative, but, to @John Conduitt's point, dramatic.  

Regarding hoard evidence, I have to resonate with what @seth77 has to say about Duplessy's penchant for not citing it.  One instance leaps to mind: the anonymous deniers and oboles of Marseilles.  Duplessy dates them, as immobilizations, as late as 1243, but without citing the significant hoard mentioned by Boudeau (c. 1914 --cited here from a xerox from a French acquaintance, annoyingly minus the title page).  @seth77, you can continue the trope of 'laziness' from dealers to cataloguers.  I could wish that Duplessy could do more in the way of updating Boudeau, never mind Fillon and Ciani --neither of which I've ever seen, Thank you, online or otherwise.  Right, I'm kind of stuck with what I've got. 

Yes it is certainly the case that some of the sequencing was worked out by comparing mints and moneyers in the documentation to those found on the coins. But a lot of that is also worked out straight from the hoards - which types are included or not. No documentation is needed to at least work out ‘early’ or ‘late’ coins from die studies. This has been the approach in England for Aethelred II. Every squiggle of hair is used as evidence.

Do the French have no documentation? Or any die or hoard studies for, say, Capetian coins? Or is it simply that everyone uses a reference that doesn’t make use of it? Is it a fear of using dates that might not be 100%?

Britain was not particularly protected from document destruction. Before 1066 there is next to nothing, and it shows in the coin dating. There are very few hoards from that time either, so you’re lucky if even the Saxon ruler’s dates are known, let alone the coin’s.

A few terrible civil wars have ensued since. But most destructive was Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. Vast amounts of records and objects were destroyed. The aim was to confiscate Church lands, and to do so, he destroyed their records of ownership. Bear in mind, church records of land ownership are all but the only records we have from Saxon times, and church records more generally are most of our historical documentation. So this has left us looking to coins as our record, rather than the other way around.

[Finn235]

Here goes...

1. I absolutely do not understand the appeal of the Syracuse type that so many laud as "the most beautiful coin ever made". Other than the portrait (which is beautiful but far from the best Greek bust out there) the coins are usually poorly made, and the horses are presented without proper perspective, which makes them look like a rat king jumble of legs.

 

2. I really despise 1) how expensive and rare most books on ancients seem to be, especially on obscure specialties, 2) how elitist some people seem to be about their books ("Buy the book before the coin"... barf) and 3) how much resistance in general there seems to be about making the content of said rare/expensive books available. In the world of video games (a much earlier passion of mine) if a video game goes out of print and cannot be purchased via any primary market means, it is generally treated as "abandoned" and fair game for free reproduction and distribution. I think the same should be true of numismatic tomes that went out of print in the 70s and now cost multiple hundreds. Especially if the author would not benefit from the sale in any way. Ideally, I think the internet can and should totally replace the need for physical books.

3) I hate fake ancients and sellers who knowingly peddle them, but even moreso, I hate people who direct total newbies to spend multiples of what would be a fair price for a coin because "It's better to spend $500 on a $50 coin than $50 on a $0 fake." And the damage all the ebay bashing did to my poor shop... I had to totally abandon all hope of being able to use my knowledge to spot a deal I could profit on because I'll end up selling a $50 coin for $20 while people all over every forum congratulate others for snagging the same type for $175. Couldn't even tell you how many times I sold a coin only to see it pop up elsewhere on ebay, Biddr, or vcoins for 2-5x what I sold it for.

4. I would much sooner collect dozens of barbarous radiates or LRBs of the same type than dozens of official coins of the same type with minor differences. I vastly prefer the barbarous coins that look like they were engraved by a toddler

5. I hate early Indo Sassanian coinage. So much. It hurts my head. Nothing makes any sense about it at all. I can't stop trying. Send help.

[JeandAcre]

@John Conduitt, for precision, the dating of Henry II Class I blows anything in French feudal out of the water.  Even in the bleso-chartrain phase of the Chateaudun issues, with a dozen intervals from c. 960-1220 (and subvariants comparable to the Short Cross subclasses), Duplessy gives anywhere from ten to thirty years to each one.  (I'm okay with that, since it still allows identification with one or, at worst, two of the hereditary viscounts.) 

And your observations on how this was achieved, near-exclusively on the basis of hoard evidence (and effectively without much help from primary material), are nothing short of enlightening.  One has to conclude that, since French numismatists are proceeding along exactly the same lines, they're simply moving that much more slowly than the British!  ...At the level of major references, Duplessy has taken thirteen years Not to publish a third (and badly needed) volume of Monnaies Feodales.

But regarding English primary sources, I still have to be skeptical about the relative scale of loss, particularly regarding royal records, of most potential relevance to the coins.  The Public Records Office has a phenomenal amount of material.  And even comparing the Civil War to the Thirty Years' War --a dress rehearsal for WWI-- is enough to make me think that we're talking about apples and oranges.

Edited February 11, 2023 by JeandAcre

[seth77]

@JeandAcre, @John Conduitt , the French Revolution was really bad with everything, from documents to monuments and necropoleis, but if it did damage numismatics-related material, it did so with great discrimination, focusing on anything pre-1300. In fact for 'primary' sources, I am not sure if British coinage has as much of the contemporary literature as the French 'ordonnances' do -- in fact there are so many French royal coinage ordonnances that they surpass the actual surviving material. Duplessy has multiple instances of 'non retrouvee' and 'conditions inconnues' for coinages that were likely minted according to contemporary documentation but have not been retrieved yet in the corpus of known medieval coins.

What I think it is actually happening is that cataloging is seen as something completely different than research and that research is almost exclusively used quantitatively rather than qualitatively in catalogs. Which means that most of the understanding we could have gotten from an endeavor in the vein of RIC for medieval numismatics we can only glance at by assembling individual articles on individual polities and aspects related to coining in those polities at specific times. And for that we need: a. knowledge of French, German, Italian, Flemish to read the numismatic articles that go in depth into 'niche' aspects and polities and b. access to the publications and knowledge of the authors who actively work these fields academically.   

And even that is not enough if you'd like to date singular issues from rulers like Berengar de Narbonne.

Edited February 12, 2023 by seth77

[JeandAcre]

Well, @seth77, what can I say?  You're just Always That Good.  ...Were you born with a silver scholarship in your mouth?

(Just for unsolicited context, I grew up in a small-town, public school district which routinely sent my grade transcripts with my name misspelled.  Welcome to America.   ...Or, well, don't bother coming here; you're likely to get shot, or run over, by someone with our legal IQ of 75 --in both contexts, and we haven't even gotten to voting yet.

(...Regarding which, I could wish we had 'literacy laws' again.  Except, this time, About Literacy, instead of guessing how many gumballs are in the machine, and, as such, directed toward the appropriate demographic.  Here, what passes for the smoking tatters of representative democracy amounts to the tyranny of the stupid.  ...For the past several decades, my country has felt like a giant high school.  The 14-year-olds are driving the school bus ...off the cliff.)

Maybe those were some unpopular non-numismatic opinions.  Sorry for that.  ...Well, a little.

Edited February 12, 2023 by JeandAcre

[seth77]

I'm not an academic at all. In fact pretty far from it. I have worked in internet infrastructure, I have translated Darwin and genetics and evolution-related works and now I do data analysis for an IT corp. My opinions come from what I have noticed as what they call in European numismatic magazines 'private researcher' and as I always want to find out more about everything and go far and beyond to get to literature and then try to piece things together to get to my main interest, which is dating stuff. I am convinced that having something dated to the full reign interval is just lazy (how's that for unpopular opinion lol). 

I am also one of those Europeans who love the US. I won't go into detail but I am really thankful for democracy and Coca Cola (no joke), and without NATO (I mean the US) I am pretty sure that we would have seen the atrocities perpetrated by the Russians in many other directions in Europe. No country is perfect but in these times it's good to live in a country that stands in help to those who fight against evil. And as again and again throughout the last 100+ years Europe couldn't have done it without the backing of the US. Perhaps this is another non-numismatic 'unpopular opinion' 😂😂😂

Edited February 12, 2023 by seth77

[Edessa]

I just finished listening to William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (57 hours) and am in the middle of his “The Collapse of the Third Republic” (48 hours). All I can say is that listening to these histories of the 1930s and 1940s makes me feel much more sanguine about the petty issues currently facing Europe and the US. Just one war on one front against the age-old enemy Russia and mobs attacking the US Capitol, but not burning it down. Of course, I am not of a generation that lost well over 20 million persons in WW1 and can’t really understand the great lengths that Governments and Peoples were willing to go in the 1930’s to avoid another war. But even in my father’s generation, roughly 75% of Americans were against entry into WWII until December 7, 1941. This was while Hitler was at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, Rommel before Alexandria and ethnic cleansing was being practiced throughout Europe. We have our problems today and they are serious, but maybe things are not so bad comparably.

The loss of historical documents in war is lamentable; however, I imagine that the current strength of weapons has made this much worse in the Middle East and Ukraine in more recent times. Not only the artifacts themselves, but the field notes of generations of archeologists that might have been stored in basements of museums and public buildings are probably ashes and can never be reconstructed. Hopefully quite a bit was published or digitized in some way to make survival more likely. The ongoing human cost of these wars is so terrible that it makes the concept that we may have recently lost critical dating material for one coin series or the other trivial. And that is probably exactly how the contemporaries back in the 1200's or 1300's felt about it also.

 

[Nerosmyfavorite68]

I collect original recordings of old time radio shows/old time radio news (like the actual original master recordings, big 16" discs).  Yes, that period's pretty interesting.  I've been taking a more passive role in the hobby, as I've accomplished most of my goals.   Mystery shows were my main specialty, although I'd also pick up some news and the occasional speech. At the beginning of my collecting, someone gave me a small collection of Col. Lindbergh's America First 16" recordings, because they knew that I could transfer them.  I found that interesting, but what excited me was that it also contained my favorite (and rare) mystery program! One of the recordings was Lilian Gish's (silent movie actress) congressional testimony, in which she fervently apologized for anti-German propaganda during WWI (these were the summer of '41). Radio shows and sound documents are also historical documents.  Anyway, I've taken a more passive role in that hobby.   People asked me to do too many projects... 

But back to coins, I guess my unpopular  opinion would be, I don't use my reference books all that much.  Oh, I eagerly read Sear's book on the Imperatorial period when it was new, but although I have that and RCV 1-3, 5, RIC I, the Byzantine Sear, and a few others, they're just that, reference.  I might open them if I have something to attribute. 

 

[David Atherton]

On 2/11/2023 at 2:23 PM, Finn235 said:

I think the internet can and should totally replace the need for physical books.

And coins. Digital images are much better than physical coins. 😉

[Roman Collector]

12 minutes ago, David Atherton said:

And coins. Digital images are much better than physical coins. 😉

You could sell the images as NFTs!!!

[DonnaML]

13 hours ago, Roman Collector said:

You could sell the images as NFTs!!!

During the height of the NFT [ = tulip bulb] craze a couple of years ago, didn't someone post on Coin Talk that there was a company actually trying to sell ancient coin NFTs? I wonder how that went.

 

[Deinomenid]

@DonnaMLit is not too late!

 

Fame and fortune await with just one click - 
 

https://opensea.io/collection/racnft/activity?search[eventTypes][0]=AUCTION_CREATED

 

[Sol_Invictus]

9 hours ago, DonnaML said:

During the height of the NFT [ = tulip bulb] craze a couple of years ago, didn't someone post on Coin Talk that there was a company actually trying to sell ancient coin NFTs? I wonder how that went.

 

To the extent that an NFT is a public transaction record that’s hard to fake or manipulate, using NFTs to track the provenance going forward of ancient coins as well as other antiquities and artwork is perhaps not entirely without merit. It’s actually one of the only cases I can think of where something like an NFT could be useful. But it’s not clear that this would provide any real advantage over existing public auction records. In practice it would probably just be cumbersome to use, and would not be widely adopted.

[Hughie Dwyer]

I have been following this thread with interest for the last few weeks. I have enjoyed hearing the opinions and preferences of everyone here. Now it's time for me to share mine.

I'm not sure how unpopular this really is, but I would rather add to my denarius collection with new and interesting emperors, creating something like a timeline,   over having loads of coins from the same few rulers.

I would also always prefer to collect a coin with a story, rather than the best looking coin I can afford as this would interest me more.

[AETHER]

On 2/13/2023 at 12:51 PM, DonnaML said:

During the height of the NFT [ = tulip bulb] craze a couple of years ago, didn't someone post on Coin Talk that there was a company actually trying to sell ancient coin NFTs? I wonder how that went.

 

What an oximoron in a way, aside from the fact that NFT's are the dumbest thing in last year, this is impressively stupid.