Siege piece

A silver siege piece, minted at Newark (Newark-on-Trent) in 1646. The lozenge-shaped flan is struck on the obverse with a large crown between the letters CR with the mark of value (XII) [1 shilling] in Roman numerals, below. The reverse, is inscribed OBS: (for obsessum 'besieged') above the name of the town 'NEWARKE' and the date '1645'.

During the English Civil War (1642-1651), Royalist commanders sometimes paid their garrisons in makeshift coins, made from silver plate. Little attempt was made to shape the pieces though each had to weigh roughly the same as the official coin and was stamped with the value and the name of the fortress. Newark was a Royallist stronghold which surrendered to the Scottish Army on 8 May, 1646. There is a minute of Newark Corporation dated 15 May 1646, recording a decision for town plate 'to be sold for the townes use, and to suplie their present want of money at the surrender of the towne', which suggests that there was a shortage of regular coinage in Newark at the end of the Civil War. Most of the Newark seige pieces (issued in both 1645 and 1646) maintain a weight standard approximately equivalent to that of the regular coinage. J.P.C. Kent (see Newark Siege Money and Civil War Coin Hoards (Cunobelin, 1969) states that '...the technique of production of the Newark siege coins is interesting. The lozenge-shaped blanks look as though they had been sliced from rolled out plates of silver, and then struck by some sort of mechanical hammer. It is noticeable that very few dies were used to produce this very substantial coinage, and the most likely mechanism to effect this would be a horse or water-operated trip hammer, of the type used to strike copper plate-money in Sweden.'