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Spanish Eight Reales countermarked as English Dollars

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jgenn

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'Two kings heads and not worth a crown'

Yes, this is another post about 8 reales. My last post did not get very many views but maybe that's because it was submerged in a flood of new journals that should have been posted as replies. If this one doesn't get many views, I promise to post on a different subject next time :)

Anyway, several 8 reales, stamped with the head of George III by the Bank of England, have shown up on Ebay recently and reminded me that I needed to take some better photos of mine to update my coin in my 'Amazing 8s' custom set.

At the time they were first circulated, 1797, they were set at a value of four shillings and nine pence, just shy of a crown, thus the phrase 'two kings heads and not worth a crown'.

One of 8 reales experts at www.coincommunity.com, swamperbob, has described these as '... one of three attempts by the Bank of England to get silver back into circulation during the monetary emergency of the very early 1800s. England was at war and needed money to fight but they also were trying to hold the line on the value of the pound sterling. World silver prices were high so any "full weigh" coins issued would immediately be melted for the silver - so NONE were made. Old worn coins (down to 50% or so) remained in circulation. So the Bank took 8R coins and stamped them to raise their face value above the silver content. These would not be melted.'

The majority of these coins featured the bust of Charles IV, known more for his interest in hunting than in managing the Spanish Empire, and George III suffered from a form of mental illness later in his reign, so the other common phrase for these coins was 'the head of a fool on the neck of an '.

My example is from 1783, with the bust of Charles III. I was keen to acquire this one, when I saw it offered on Ebay in early 2011, because it was the best example of a coin from this year that I had seen and I wanted to redeem myself for purchasing one of those overpriced, 'America's first dollar', sea-salvaged 1783s.

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