The £20,000 Coin: Uncovering the Rarest Treasures of the Royal Mint Museum

For more than a thousand years, one of the key responsibilities of the state has been the production and the regulation of money. For much of that time, the Royal Mint was based in London, in the Tower of London. But a generation ago, it moved out here to the Welsh Valleys, this super secure location, which I have been given exclusive access to today. So I'm off to check out some of the treasures of the Royal Mint, if I can get in. So how many coins have you got in there? We've got roughly over 100,000, but we're always adding to it, all the time. No way! We're growing all the time. But that's British and foreign as well? British, overseas, the Minstern, for every country around the world pretty much, we've done something for them. But in terms of where we all begin, it starts here really. How far back do you go? We go all the way back, in terms of our establishment, to the reign of Alfred the Great. Oh really? And that is what we see here in this tray. We've got some Anglo-Saxon silver pennies, a few Viking imitations, but the interesting one is this down here. Obverse, the head side, the reverse side there as well. So what we see here is a penny of Alfred the Great, a sort of stylised depiction of old Alfred there. A nose, an eye there, and the hair, a split inscription, Alfred. The interesting thing is the reverse, this Londonia monogram. You've got his brother here, so you do go back earlier as well. So why is Alfred so special? Alfred is a sort of symbolic start date for us really. When he claims London and starts minting in London, that's where we sort of get our beginnings from in roughly the 880s. When that happens, that's when you can trace the founding of the raw mint. And it's a bit of a shaky start, but we can certainly say from hand on heart that from the late 9th century onwards, you've got a continuous history of an organisation that we know as the raw mint. So if we move from here, we start to look at some gold coinage. So you have to wait a while before you get a regular supply of gold coins. And that doesn't come about until the reign of Edward III. Look at those! And what we see is the first regular gold coinage in England, which is called a gold noble. It's this spectacular gold coin that we see here. Those are just magical. What's changing? What you're seeing here is England, in particular Edward III, with his aspirations in France particularly, catching up with what's going on on the continent. There's been a gold coinage on the continent for a while, and he needs to sort of catch up with it. England rather needs to catch up. So you get the introduction of this gold noble, which is a very valuable coin. It's worth at the time six shillings and eight pence, which sounds bonkers to modern ears because of the way it's the structure of the system. But it does work because believe it or not, three of these would actually give you one pound. Literally. And that means a pound of gold? Literally. In weight? And also in denomination as well. Right. So that's where you're coming from. The 20 shilling piece, the idea of 20 shillings worth of money. And how many pence in a shilling? How many pence in a shilling? So you've got 12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound. Right, okay. So you're looking at, this would be a fortune in the 14th century. This is a huge amount of money. This is only going to be used by your merchants, your banks and your gentry. And it's going to go across national boundaries. So imagine an English merchant going off to France to buy goods in bulk. He's probably paying his French counterpart with a small purse full of these things. And that explains the time and effort that have gone into making this truly remarkable, stunning coin. And again, it has to be reliable because otherwise trade will break down. There'll be no trust. Exactly. Yeah. And you have to make sure you get the right ratio of gold to the value of the coin. This is actually Edward's second attempt of a gold coinage. The first one, he gets it wrong. There's too much gold in relation to its actual face value and people just melt it down because it's worth more as bullion. So if anyone comes across leopards, which are up here, they're extremely valuable pieces because they're next to none left. These leopards here? These leopards up here, yeah. Wow. Coins do a lot of heavy lifting, don't they? I mean, coins through our history, they're an expression of royal power, they're international propaganda, they're an essential tool of trade. I mean, there's so many different jobs. The joy of them is that even though they're quite small, relatively, you can fit quite a lot of messaging onto them and they're highly portable as a result. And that means that this messaging that you've got in here, which is quite cleverly done, can be seen much more widely. You know, it's going to go into continental Europe. This is going to be seen by the right sort of people in continental Europe. So you're getting a very powerful message across. Asking for a friend, how much would it cost to buy one of those now? It's tricky because they do vary. But if you've got a spare sort of £20,000 knocking around, you'll probably be able to get sort of an entry level one. And they go up in value from there, depending on condition, depending on rarity and different types. So yeah, anywhere between £20,000, £40,000 and above, £1,000. So we're approaching, very excitingly now, the 18th century, and I need to show you my precious treasure that I found. Let's have a look. On the foreshore of the Thames, a George II coin. You've got Britannia on there. Yeah. 1752. So just almost the Seven Years' War, which is a particular area of interest for me, but what can you tell me about that? What is it? So what you actually have here is a ha'penny. That's a ha'penny? That is a ha'penny. Oh. It's a copper ha'penny. And we have... How do you know that? Is it small? It's the size. Also from the design. Obviously you can see George II on there. But what you get is Britannia appearing on the copper ha'penny and farthings of the period. Interesting, if it does tie in with Charles II, because it's during his reign that you start to see copper ha'penny and farthings being struck. We also have one of these ourselves. Oh, brilliant. Well, I'm not surprised. Are you telling me this isn't the rarest coin in the world and it's worth £10 million? I'm afraid... I'm afraid not. Unfortunately, you might have to hold off on your expectations of value, but, Carls, there is one of ours. Is that the same one? 1752. Isn't that cool? Same piece. I love it. One of our real strengths as a collection is we have a lot of rare coins. And I can't let you go today without you seeing the coinage of Edward VIII. Right, who only ruled for months. Edward VIII is the infamous monarch who abdicates in 1936. He comes to the throne in January 1936 and he's gone by December of the same year. And because he's on the throne for such a short period of time, no coinage bearing his portrait is ever released into circulation. We were about a month away from going into mass production, planned for January 1937. Dodged a bullet there, didn't you? Yeah, well and truly. But the problem we have is that we go through the whole design process, creating a new monarch's coinage from new reverse designs and a new portrait. And what you see here are very, very rare coins, because there are all the trials, the tests and the patterns that go into developing a new monarch's coinage. So hugely rare pieces as we didn't go into production. I'm sure there's hardly any and we're probably looking at the lion's share of the... Well and truly. And you can see from some of these marks here that the British Museum have to borrow the pieces from us, because they don't have any in their collection. So it gives you an idea of how rare they are. But Edward is a very difficult man to deal with for us at the Royal Mint, because it's tradition that the way the monarch faces should alternate by reign. And that is a long tradition that goes all the way back to Charles II. And Edward would have been the first monarch to have broken those centuries of tradition because he felt that this was his best side. Oh no way! And he was doggedly determined to have his best side appear on the coinage, yeah. And ironically though, it never was released, so his brother George was able to keep the tradition going. Yep, the Mint sort of pretended that Edward played ball and if you put three of them in a row they actually face the same way, because the public will have never seen these. So you actually have three monarchs facing in the same direction to maintain the tradition going through it all. One thing we forget about these, and the abdication more generally, is just how controversial it was. In 1936, this was a massive constitutional crisis. And we have a great object in our collection which helps illustrate that, which we can go and have a look at now. So we've come over here to look at the box in which the Edward VIII coinage was kept. And this I think really does demonstrate that constitutional crisis at the time in 1936. Because when he abdicates, the Mint doesn't want to seem to be tainted by the controversy of Edward VIII. So all of those coins we've seen are bundled into this box. It's only a small box and it's got this wonderful inscription which is, Not to be opened except in the presence of two senior officers of the Royal Mint. That was then clearly wrapped up with string. And with a seal on it. It's then sealed off to show if anybody's been at it. Old fashioned carton wax seal. And these, this little box of coins, sits at the back of the Deputy Master's safe for about 30 years before in the 1970s they're finally allowed to enter the light of day and come into the Museum's collection. So they weren't even allowed into the Museum? No, they sat at the back of the Deputy Master's safe. That shows how toxic it was. Completely. And if we open it, we can see how these things were stored. You've got all the little envelopes that we have here in which the coins themselves would have been kept. And you've got a little note here as well which logs every time anybody would have accessed the actual collection itself. Something so symbolic about that. Just put them all in a box and shut it away in a dark safe in the Tower of London. Until such time as it's no longer controversial. We've all got those things in our houses that we just want to push out of the way and forget about. This is the Royal Mint's equivalent. Ours are a little bit more valuable. The Monarchy's dark secret. And ironically, these are now the most valuable coins in your collection. Probably by far and away. Wow. They're incredibly rare pieces. Isn't it funny? Before I go, what's your favourite coin of all the ones we've seen or ones you haven't seen? Probably one that I have to say is actually a coinage portrait of Charles II. It's called the Petition Crown. It's done by an engraver called Thomas Simon. It's a wonderful depiction of Charles II. You really get a sense of the playboy monarch from looking at this portrait. Love that. Well, thanks very much, man. Pleasure. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. I headed over to the museum to speak to Rebecca Morgan about the auctions at the Royal Mint and the reasons why rare coins remain such an important part of our history. What's this one here? This is the Henry VII Sovereign, regarded as the coin that started it all. The Sovereign is still the most collected coin today, known as the chief coin of the world. And Henry VII ordered for this to be made because of the prestige, really, of the largest gold coin made at the time. You could eat your dinner off that. I wouldn't. Well, that's the funny thing about coins, isn't it? They're designed to allow you to buy and sell and to represent wealth, and yet they've become so valuable. They're collector's items now as well. They're a piece of history, aren't they, coins? They went through a certain period of time, they were made in a certain period of time, whose hands they could have passed through. That's what fascinates people, is the story behind the coin. I mean, the design is beautiful and some people collect for design alone, but usually it's the story that really gets people hooked into collecting. They're quite valuable, I guess, right? So they're a good source of, if you're nervous about economic breakdown, you can keep them in your house and under your bed. Absolutely, they can be, and it obviously depends on what you collect. So circulating coins generally are less so, but the rarer the coin, usually the more valuable it can become. Do people send you in coins and do you have a kind of antiques roadshow role here? We absolutely have two sides to that. So we have the Royal Mint Museum, who look at anything that is post-decimalisation and even pre-decimalisation as well. But we have an authentication evaluation service in the Royal Mint as well, where you can send your coins in to be authenticated and valued, if you wish. Do you ever get people sending in coins that they think are going to be amazing, it turns out they're forgeries and they're... Absolutely, all of the time. But we also have the other way, where people are sending coins that they just think are a run-of-the-mill coin and actually really, really invaluable. There must be some forgeries though, that become quite valuable even though they're forgeries, like if they're old enough. I think generally the forgeries are always less valuable than the genuine coin. Sometimes they detract from the genuine coin, but if you find a genuine rarity then you really are really lucky. If I won the lottery, I would try and collect a coin from every single monarch of England and Britain. That is an absolutely... That's the most popular way to collect actually. Oh, fine, okay, thanks very much. So a monarch, that's what people start collecting, they either collect a monarch from every era or they collect a denomination from one monarch, if they like a monarch in particular. We saw the Henry VII Sovereign earlier, that is classed as the first sovereign that started off the sovereign we still see today. Really popular amongst collective sovereigns. People try to collect one from every monarch or one from every time that they were struck. We have a full auction programme at the Royal Mint where people can consign their collections, so if you want to move on from a collection, you've collected all your sovereigns and now you've decided you want to collect guineas, you can put your sovereign collection into auction and consign it to us and we will get you the best price for it. So that doesn't... So you're not auctioning off stuff from your own collections, you're just helping other people to get rid of... Absolutely. Auctions generally are consignment led. We do have our own auctions, a trial pieces auction which is exclusive to us, which is our own stock because it's something we've created as an individual to the Royal Mint. We also have a consignment auction programme where people can consign their coins and see what price they get for it in the market. What is the future of coins do you think? Because we're all talking about Bitcoin, we're all talking about NFTs, do you think there's a future for bits of precious metal like that? I think the fact that 1,100 years on from the Royal Mint starting we are still seeing a massive amount of people collecting coins is testament to the future of collecting coins as well. The Alpha, the Great Penny, one of the oldest coins we ever struck is absolutely still on everybody's wish list. The First Sovereign which was hundreds of years ago, people still want to own these pieces of history. I don't think history will ever become uninteresting. In our digital world of quantitative easing and cryptocurrencies it was great to reconnect with coins made of precious metals, a way of exchanging wealth that stretches back for millennia. And each of those coins that I've seen today connects you with a particular point in our history, the craftsmanship, the art, the outlook and the ideas that underpin our society.