THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

UNITED KINGDOM
mechanical, and more so as we approach the long reign
of George III.
This division readily lends itself to a distribution
under the following heads or sections :—British Period,
Anglo-Saxon Period, Anglo-Norman Period, the Plan-
tagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, the Commonwealth and
Protectorate, the Second Stuart Period, the Hanoverian
Dynasty (and Anglo-Hanoverian series of coins), and the
earlier Colonial currencies.
Notwithstanding the extensive, learned, and successful
researches of Sir John Evans, the attribution of a vast
family of money in a variety of metals, with rude types
and destitute of any clues in the shape of names of
rulers or of places of origin, must be considered as still
on its trial, and as beset with the utmost difficulty
and uncertainty. The coins usually termed British or
Gaulish, on speculation or conjecture, may often have
been struck in other and distant parts of Europe, and it
is hardly probable that the Britons themselves produced
a fraction of the numismatic remains ascribed to them
by the older school of writers on this subject. One
trustworthy criterion in allocating the pieces of so-
called British or Gaulish fabric to their true patria,
and so at all events narrowing the inquiry, may be the
comparison of the Mediaeval coinages of France, Ger-
many, &c, with them, which would, no doubt, reveal
the survival of local characteristics, and so assist in
identifying a British or Gaulish piece as the original
occupant of a German or even an Asiatic home. (See
Hazlitt, " Coins of Europe," p. 98.)
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