Beschreibung:

ENGLISH MEDIEVAL COINS - EDWARD IV - YORK - 'ARCHBISHOP SHARP COLLECTION' PENNY 1471-1483 AD Obv: facing bust with EDWARD DI GRA REX ANGLI legend and uncertain mintmark. Rev: long cross and pellets with quatrefoil at centre with CIVI TAS EBO RACI legend for York mint. 0.71 grams. [No Reserve] Condition Very fine. Provenance Ex Morton & Eden Ltd sale; formerly in the Archbishop John Sharp (1644-1714) collection. Literature S. 2127; N. 1647. Footnotes Dr John Sharp (1644-1714), Archbishop of York from 1691 was an enthusiastic collector and student of coins and medals; his interest seems to have begun around 1687 when, as Rector of St Giles in the Fields, he ‘found it a good divertisement in the evening’. In contrast to nearly all his numismatic forbears and contemporaries who were interested in Ancient Greece and Rome, Sharp selected the coinages of the British Isles and, to a lesser extent, the Colonies and Continental Europe, as his chosen fields. He wrote his ‘Observations on the Coinage of England with a letter to Mr [Ralph] Thoresby’ in 1698-99, which was to circulate amongst numismatists in manuscript form for nearly a century before being finally printed in 1785. Subsequent owners of the Sharp collection evidently added to the collection. The historical sequence of ownership of the collection runs as follows: (i) Dr John Sharp (1644-1714), Archbishop of York; (ii).John Sharp (1674-1726), eldest son of the Archbishop, of Grafton Park, Northamptonshire; (iii) Dr Thomas Sharp (1693-1758), his brother, who was Archdeacon of Northumberland and Prebendary of Durham; (iv).His son Dr John Sharp (1723-1792), Vicar of Hartburn, Perpetual Curate of Bamburgh, who succeeded his father as Archdeacon of Northumberland and who oversaw extensive restoration of the largely-ruined Bamburgh Castle; (v) His daughter Anne Jemima Sharp (1762-1816), who bequeathed it in her will to her uncle Granville Sharp (1735-1813), the prominent Anti-Slavery campaigner. In the event Granville died before his niece, so that on her death in 1819 it passed to her first cousin, another great-granddaughter of the Archbishop: (vi) Catherine Sharp (1770-1843) of Clare Hall, near Barnet, whose husband Rev. Andrew Boult took the name Sharp on marriage; (vii) Her nephew Thomas Barwick Lloyd-Baker (1807-86), the social reformer and ornithologist who was also a direct descendant of the Archbishop through his maternal grandfather William Sharp (1729-1810), George III’s surgeon; thence by descent. During the 1960s and 1970s material from the celebrated Archbishop Sharp Collection was sold through the agency of dealers A.H. Baldwin & Sons, and Owen Parsons of Gloucester. There were auctions of Continental Coins (Sotheby & Co., 14 March 1966) and the particularly important English Coins and Medals Charles I – Anne (and Colonial Coins) held by Glendining & Co., 5 October 1977. The cataloguer of the latter sale drew attention to the distinctive toning found on many of the Archbishop Sharp silver coins, a feature which applies equally to the pieces offered here. Some of these have been studied and occasionally referenced in the past.