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1108

1785 Counterfeit George III British Halfpenny, Newman 51-85B. 130.0 grains.

Currency:USD Category:Coins & Paper Money Start Price:25.00 USD Estimated At:NA
1785 Counterfeit George III British Halfpenny, Newman 51-85B. 130.0 grains.
SOLD
650.00USD+ (130.00) buyer's premium + applicable fees & taxes.
This item SOLD at 2024 Jan 20 @ 20:07UTC-6 : CST/MDT
1785 Counterfeit George III British Halfpenny, Newman 51-85B. 130.0 grains.Very Fine, an attractive example of the variety, well struck, with the legends and date strong, the very bottom of the first digit slightly off the planchet. Good, solid design detail on either side, including the large and distinct diebreak atop Britannia’s head. Pleasing medium brown, the surfaces hard, and though there are some ancient hairlines, they require a glass to see. This is a fitting coin to start off Neil’s run of 1785-dated counterfeits, as this is the iconic reverse that was illustrated with a line drawing by C. Wyllys Betts over 125 years ago, in his 1886 publication Counterfeit Half Pence Current in the American Colonies and their Issue from the Mints of Connecticut and Vermont, as his number 4. Betts’s paper also included the first illustration of the 1787 Connecticut copper Miller 1.4-WW, one of the 1786 Bungtown Connecticuts, and the extremely rare 1786 counterfeit that is stylistically similar – this landmark paper was also the first to describes some of the Machin’s Mills counterfeit halfpence as American-made, explicitly tying them to Connecticut and Vermont copper coinage. In 1981 The Colonial Newsletter did an annotated reprint of the Betts work, which is now available for free on the Newman Numismatic Portal. At the time the annotated Betts was published the existence of the 1785 was unknown, and it wasn’t until four years later that Ringo announced the discovery of his specimen, also in the pages of CNL – almost exactly a century after Betts had first described the coin! Since then, more have been found, most of them in England, disproving Eric Newman’s assertion that these were made specifically for North America – and because few counterfeits were much-valued by British collectors at the time (one noted English author calling them “album weeds”), they would not have appeared at auction, or in the numismatic literature Newman would have seen. While certainly made in – and for – England, the 1781 and 1785 coins are quite different from other counterfeit families: they are exceptionally well-made, tend to weigh within 20% of regal standard, and while they both have solid die-linkage within each date, there are no mules with other counterfeit series, no odd George-II mules, and no other dates at all to be found in either the 1781 or 1785 family. Both the 1781 and 1785 pieces saw much circulation based on the grades of surviving examples, with Fine probably the average grade for each date. This example is a shade off both the Ringo and Syd Martin coins, the only two of the variety that have been catalogued and sold at auction. The variety was missing from the Eric Newman collection, who used the coin sold in the Martin sale as the plate piece for this reverse in his 1988 article.
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