THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

THE COLLECTOR SERIES
Southern Britain from the third century B.C. to the
fifth A.D., varying and fluctuating in its character and
execution between an approximately artistic style in
the inscribed money and the most degraded barbarism
in a large proportion of the uninscribed. There was a
sufficient lapse of time at any rate to account for all the
known varieties of type ; and it is now understood that,
although the celebrated gold stater of Philip of Mace-
don was a favourite object of the copyists in Gaul and
Britain, the engravers there resorted to many other
models.
We have referred to the uncertainty attendant on
the settlement of the original provenance of many of
the uninscribed British coins, as well as of those in the
inscribed series, from the habitual absence of any token
which we are able to recognise as a mint-mark or note
of place. The more or less uniform restriction, how-
ever, of certain inscribed coins, when they occur, to a
particular district or zone, may not only be taken for
what it is independently worth, but for its analogical
virtue in encouraging and justifying the application of
the same criterion to the much larger anepigraphic
collection in our hands, and consequently in claiming
a British origin for a greater proportion of the entire
body of extant remains.
We are admitted to so scanty an acquaintance with
the political vicissitudes connected with the British
epoch, alike before and after the Roman time, that it
is futile to speculate on the circumstances which led
to the establishment of a coinage in Britain, when it
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