Identifying an Irish Hammered Penny of Henry III

It is always a pleasure helping identify Irish coins but this one I enjoyed more than most. The give away details on this particular coin are the monarchs portrait in a triangle on the obverse. This almost certainly made it an Irish coin and an earlier one at that. Upon turning the coin over, the reverse has a Voided Long Cross, which helped date the coin to the period of Henry III.

So now I knew the era we were looking at the next important part was to find were it was minted. Well this was the real easy part, as during this period Dublin was the only mint operating. If you look closely on the reverse you can see ON DIVE (of Dublin). So far so good. We knew the King and also the Mint. Now it was time to find out who actually made the coin. Unlike the Mints in England, there were only two moneyers making the coins at this time in Ireland. Their names were Ricard and Davi. It was time to look closely again at the reverse and I could see that the name began with an R, in the inscription. Straight away I knew it was minted by Ricard.

The Irish coins of Henry III are split up into 2 classes which are each in turn split into four types. In order to find out what class it belonged to, I needed to check out a number of details on the obverse. This fell into the category of a type Ic coin. Not only did it have a sexfoil to the right of the bust it also had pronounced double line of pellets forming the beard and the shoulders are formed from pellets. Another aspect of this class is that he crown is formed from arcs and pellets and it also has a small triangle below the central fleur of the crown The inscription around the triangle confirmed what we already believed. This coin was from the reign of Henry III - heNRI CVSR eX III – (Henry III King)

So there we have it. A, Type 1c, Irish Penny of Henry III, Dublin Mint, Moneyer Ricard.