: Excavation & Discovery

The final group of rings in this account are much more protective of their secrets. Lacking mottoes or symbols, they are largely decorative in form, and although they may well have had personal significance for their owners, unfortunately we now have no way of uncovering what this could have been. A particularly fine example is the gold and sapphire ring found at Pembroke by Mr Kevin Higgs in February 2014. The sapphire is polished (known as a cabochon), rather than cut, as was common in the Middle Ages, and is placed in a hexagonal setting. Unfortunately, the sapphire has broken in two and has come out of the setting, but it is still clear to see its beauty. Sapphires were imported from Sri Lanka and were thought to have the ability to cure headaches and other ailments and to protect against witchcraft, so maybe this ring’s purpose was not entirely decorative after all.

Such an expensive import from the very edge of the known world must have belonged to a very wealthy individual, and it is tempting to speculate that it could have belonged to an inhabitant of Pembroke Castle or the nearby priory. The majority of the other rings in this category, however, lack stones and were decorated only with a series of patterns, ranging from the irregular, crude cross-hatching on a 15th century silver-gilt example discovered near Gileston, Vale of Glamorgan by Mr Mark Watson in 2011, to the sleek, understated band of pellets and raised borders on an early Tudor gold ring found at Holt in 2013 by Mr A. E. Jenkins.

The last execution for forgery took place in 1830 and Victorian forgers were punished by transportation, imprisonment and hard labour. The punishment for counterfeiting today is several years’ imprisonment.

Have you ever been guilty of passing fake coins?

A forged Charles I half-crown. The corroded base metal core can clearly be seen through the thin silver plating.

Your answer will hopefully be, “no, of course not!”, but would you be able to spot one if you saw one?

According to the Royal Mint, just over 2.5% of the £1 coins circulating in 2015 were counterfeit, so how many of us have unwittingly broken the law by handling fake money? But far from being a modern problem, you may be surprised to learn that counterfeit coins have been causing headaches for the authorities for thousands of years – for as long as we have been using money, in fact.

Occasionally, metal detectorists who unearth coins and report them to the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Wales (PAS Cymru), are told that what they have found is not what it seems to be – it is in fact a fake. In 2015, out of 679 coins reported, seven were judged by experts at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales to be contemporary counterfeits. Many more were described as ‘irregular’ and therefore also produced under suspicious circumstances.

One of the fakes was a Charles I half crown, discovered by Mr Nick Mensikov at Miskin, Rhondda Cynon Taf. A half crown is a silver coin, but Mr Mensikov’s example gave itself away as a fake because corrosion revealed it to have only a thin coating of silver over a copper alloy core. In ‘mint’ condition it would have looked sound enough to the untrained eye, but its real value would have been well below the two shillings and sixpence (or one-eighth of a pound) that the half crown represented.

Twelve fake coins from the reign of Charles I found in Wales have been reported to PAS Cymru since 2009, far outweighing those of any other monarch, but the great majority are much older than this and date from the period of Roman occupation, from the first to the early fifth century AD.

Who made counterfeits, and why?

Counterfeit coins were made for several reasons in the past. Sometimes, when supplies of the smaller denomination coins were inadequate, unofficial production took place to make up the shortfall. In Roman Britain this happened to such an extent that at some periods there may have been as many fake coins in circulation as real ones. After Claudius’s invasion in AD 43 the Roman army itself may have been responsible for much of this ‘irregular’ coinage, which was sometimes tolerated by governments as being something of a necessary evil.

In other cases, people forged coins purely and simply for monetary gain. Of course, this was not an easy process. It required access to supplies of metals, a furnace or crucible, and various other bits and pieces of equipment, including dies or moulds on which had been engraved a passable copy of the coin to be reproduced. This meant that forgery operations generally involved more than one person, as well as some initial financial outlay, and so they were not the last resort of a poor man or woman with no other way of getting cash.

Some ‘coiners’, as forgers were sometimes called, were already wealthy individuals. In 1603 a coining operation was uncovered at Duncannon Fort in Ireland. Moulds, pieces of brass, crucibles, as well as chemicals and charcoal, were discovered in the desk of the fort’s commander, Sir John Brockett. Sir John had been producing counterfeit English and Spanish coins, for which he was put on trial for treason.

Some forgeries were never intended for use as cash, however. As early as the sixteenth century antiquaries and collectors began to be interested in old coins, and consequently some unscrupulous individuals went into business supplying fakes to tempt the unsuspecting or naïve. In early Victorian London, one Edward Emery was responsible for passing a possible 5-700 fake medieval and Tudor coins onto the collectors’ market. Roman coins were also highly collectable, and a modern era replica of one was found by a Mr Rogers in Usk in 2007. Made of a white base metal alloy designed to look like silver, was it thrown away in disgust by its owner when he realised what he had bought?

How were counterfeit coins made?

There were two main methods of producing fake coins – striking them from stolen or forged dies, or casting them in moulds. A coining operation in Ireland in 1601 used metal and chalk dies to strike the coins, which were made of an alloy which included enough tin to create the necessary silver colour, although the coins, of course, contained no precious metal. This was obviously a noisy activity and so coining dens were often located either in busy areas such as town centres where the noise and activity would be masked by the hustle and bustle of the streets, or in out-of-the-way places where people were unlikely to go. The latter option was chosen by the Roman forgers at work in the lead mine at Draethen, near Caerphilly. Discovered here were coins, the ‘flans’, or blanks, from which the false coins were struck, as well as the metal rods from which the flans were cut. These items were found around a hearth, and we can only guess at the hot, unpleasant and dangerous atmosphere that this subterranean forging operation would have created.

Casting was a different process, but it still required access to a powerful heat source as molten metal was required. An impression of both sides of a genuine coin was made in clay, wax or ashes. The hardened moulds were then fixed together and filled with molten metal alloy. Some cast coins are given away by the tell-tale remains of the channel through which the metal was poured and which wasn’t properly broken off or filed down. There has been plenty of evidence for this forging method from Roman London, consisting of both the cast coins themselves (often in a silvery-looking alloy of bronze and tin) as well as hundreds of moulds.

The appearance of precious metal necessary to pass off a fake coin was not only achieved by cunning uses of alloys (some of which included arsenic for a whitening effect!). Some coins – like the Charles I half-crown mentioned earlier – were made from base metals which were then plated with a thin coating of silver or gold to achieve the desired effect. Medieval forgeries often used a technique called fire gilding. A base metal blank was rubbed with a mixture of gold and mercury which was then heated. The mercury was evaporated and the gold was bonded to the surface. The coin could then be struck between the dies.

This process obviously required some technical skill, and there is evidence that forgers were experimenting with methods that would later be used for more legitimate purposes. A counterfeit coin of William III (1689–1702) was found to have been made by an early example of the Sheffield plating technique. A copper plate was rolled or hammered between two thin sheets of silver from which blank coins were then cut out. The edges were covered with a copper and silver alloy and the blanks were then struck with official dies smuggled out of the London mint.

The gold and silver necessary for the plating were sourced by clipping real coins (an offence in itself) as well as melting down pieces of plate or other coins.

Punishments

The severity of the punishments for counterfeiting have reflected both the seriousness of the crime but also the difficulty of detecting those responsible. Like many penalties of the pre-modern era, they were physical in nature. In ancient Rome it was a capital offence, equated with treason, and could be punished by banishment or slavery if you were lucky, or crucifixion if you weren’t. In the early 4th century, Emperor Constantine – who is more famous for making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire – introduced burning for forgers.

In 10th-century England, under King Athelstan (927–939), the forger would lose a hand, but one of his Norman successors, Henry I (1100–1135), went one better. Suspecting his official mint workers of producing irregular coinage on the side and unhappy with the standard of the regular issues, he summoned them to a Christmas gathering at Winchester where he took the right hand and both testicles from each of them.

Under Edward I and later kings, death by hanging was the usual punishment for men, with burning and strangulation reserved for women. Three unfortunate 16th century Edinburgh women suffered this appalling punishment, while in 1560 Robert Jacke, a Dundee merchant, was hanged and quartered merely for importing forgeries. Nineteen executions for counterfeiting took place in 1697 when Sir Isaac Newton was Warden of the Royal Mint.

2013 was the birth tercentenary of the Third Earl of Bute, a powerful figure in eighteenth century Britain – renowned both as a politician and as a botanist. One of his greatest contributions to botany was a book called the Botanical Tables, and Amgueddfa Cymru is fortunate to own a complete set of this rare and exquisite publication.

John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (1713-1792) was a friend and confidante of George III. Early in his career Bute reluctantly became a politician, encouraged by his royal friend. In May 1762, he was appointed Prime Minister. However, Bute proved an unpopular leader and resigned after a year. He must have been relieved to retire from public life to his house at Highcliffe in Hampshire, with his vast botanical library, to continue his botanical interests.

Carl Linnaeus's new taxonomic system

Bute worked on several botanical publications and was strongly influenced by the renowned Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus. Bute's best known publication was entitled Botanical Tables, or to give it its full title; Botanical Tables containing the different familys of British Plants distinguished by a few obvious parts of Fructification rang'd in a Synoptical method. Published in 1785, the aim of the Tables was to explain the principles of Linnaeus's new and controversial taxonomic system.

Most of the illustrations in the Botanical Tables were by the artist John Miller (1715-1790). It was a huge task, involving over 600 illustrations detailing the sexual organs and their number to comply with the Linnaean system. Each set of Tables consists of 9 volumes covering the whole range of British plant life - including mosses, grasses, flowers and trees, as well as lichens, fungi and seaweeds - and contains detailed illustrations of every plant listed.

Twelve sets of the Tables were printed by Lord Bute at his own expense, at a total cost of £1,000. Most sets were bound in speckled fawn calf leather with the Bute coat of arms placed centrally. Two sets were specially prepared for the royal family and bound in red goatskin with pages edged in gold but without the Bute arms.

Botany as a fashionable amusement

Bute was particularly keen to explain the taxonomic system to women, since he felt that this "delightful part of nature" was peculiarly suited to the attention of the "fair sex"; botany, under their protection, would soon become a fashionable amusement. True to this aim Bute presented seven sets of the Tables to women:

Amgueddfa Cymru has in its collections loose illustrations and tables that are thought either to have been draft copies or material being prepared for a subsequent edition. However, in 1994 the Museum acquired a complete copy of the Botanical Tables at a Christie's sale of highly important books from Beriah Botfield's Library.

Whilst trying to ascertain which of the original 12 sets the Museum holds, researchers here have managed to trace 10 sets, 7 of which can be identified with their original recipients.

Perhaps, one day, the remaining two will be discovered on a dusty shelf of an old library and then all twelve original copies can be accounted for.

Recipients

The recipients of the twelve copies of the Botanic Tables:

Pontnewydd Cave

Excavations at Pontnewydd Cave, Denbighshire have discovered the oldest human remains known from Wales dating back some 230,000 years.

Excavations at the cave by Amgueddfa Cymru between 1978 and 1995 unearthed a total of

19 teeth , discovered found deep inside the cave. These have been identified by experts at the Natural History Museum, London as belonging to an early form of Neanderthal.

Neanderthals in Wales

Neanderthals are one branch of the human evolutionary tree that is thought to have died out approximately 36,000 years ago. Our own species shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals, but did not evolve from them.

Neanderthals were fairly short and stocky, had ridges under their eyebrows, big square jaws, and teeth that are larger than ours are today.

Study of the remains found at Pontnewydd found that these teeth represent the remains of at least five individuals.

Neanderthal Teeth

The teeth have all been x-rayed and they show an interesting characteristic known as taurodontism - an enlarged pulp cavity to the teeth and shorter roots. Taurodontism is a characteristic (although not unique) feature of Neanderthal teeth and it is one of the features that has led experts to decide that these are Neanderthal as opposed to another early human.

The people discovered in Pontnewydd Cave range in age from

young children to adults. The most complete discovery from the site is a fragment of an upper jaw of a child aged around nine years old. In the jaw a very heavily worn milk tooth can be seen sitting next to a newly erupted permanent molar.

Food remains

The teeth were not found on their own inside the cave. Alongside them were

stone tools and animal bones , some of which show signs of butchery - evidence that these were the food remains of these early Neanderthals.

Questions remain as to whether these humans were originally buried in graves within the cave. The cave has since been washed through by the melt water from the retreating ice sheets at the end of the last Ice Age. Unfortunately the forces that have remarkably led to the preservation of these teeth deep within Pontnewydd Cave destroyed any traces of their original burial context.