Coins deposited in the Court of Chancery, in the case 'Jones v. Lloyd'

London, England, around AD 1700

Coins from a court case lost in Chancery

These coins entered the English legal system as suitors' funds in the Court of Chancery; they were used as a sort of deposit by one of the participants in the case entitled 'Jones v. Lloyd'. No other information was recorded about the case. The case became moribund, and the fund, designated an Unclaimed Balance, was held in the Bank of England in the name of Chancery from 1726 until 1978, when the coins were examined and then deposited on loan at the British Museum.

The coins represent the middle level of English currency of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, just before the Great Recoinage, begun in 1696, replaced all the old hand-made coins of the Tudors and Stuarts with machine-made money.

They include a few coins of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I, many of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, and several of Charles II. The latest piece is a 1696 shilling of William III. Four are gold and 1,746 are silver, mostly half-crowns, shillings and sixpences, but no small change of either silver or the new copper coinages. Their face value was about £75 (equivalent to several thousand pounds in modern terms). Many of the coins are heavily worn and clipped, and there are several counterfeits, all features of the currency of the period.

The containers for the coins, four wash-leather bags and a wooden box, were also kept.

L. Ming-Hsun, The great recoinage of 1696 to (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963)