Coins and Medals
When John Fenn (1739-1794) published his Index to the Prints Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London, from 1717 to 1784, he imposed order on a series of highly various engravings by George Vertue (1684-1756) and James Basire Sr (1730-1802), collected as Vetusta Monumenta. For the prints depicting numismatic objects—Plates 1.20, 1.43, 1.55, and 1.56—Fenn distinguished between “Coins” and “Medals,” and this will be the starting point of this essay for the online Vetusta Monumenta project (Fenn 1784, 22).
For someone trying to make sense of the miscellaneous, Fenn had to work with engravings of coins and medals that included non-numismatic items like a papal bull, which is a seal (Plate 1.43), and the Phoenix Jewel of Elizabeth I (Plate 1.20), an enamelled pendant rather than a medal. Fenn overlooks a jeton (token or counter) of Perkin Warbeck (Plate 1.43) and medals depicting Queen Anne of Denmark, Prince Henry and Charles I (Plate 1.55). Vertue’s engraving of Stuart pieces illustrates both “MEDALS & GOLD Coins,” including coins of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her grandson Charles I, but is indexed by Fenn under the rubric of “medals” (Plate 1.55; Fenn 1784, 22). Fenn and Vertue can, however, be forgiven for gaps and for some terminological inaccuracy and overlap, because the distinction between coins and medals is even now not always clearly delineated.
Coins are the easier category to define, as the term consistently refers to metallic pieces that circulate as legal tender (Plate 1.56). Samuel Johnson’s primary definition is good: “Money stamped with a legal impression” (Johnson 1755, 1.420). And it has endured, although the Oxford English Dictionary’s formulation lacks Johnson’s elegant concision: “A piece of metal (gold, silver, copper, etc.) of definite weight and value, usually a circular disc, made into money by being stamped with an officially authorized device; a piece of money” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “coin,” II.5).
Things are more complicated with medals. We now think of medals primarily as being rewards for military or naval service, like the Victoria Cross or the Purple Heart, but this was not a sense that was generally current when Vetusta Monumenta was being published. The OED is not particularly helpful here because it provides a modern definition that does not entirely apply to the medal as understood in the eighteenth century: “A coin-shaped metal object, made esp. for commemorative purposes” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "medal," I). Compare to Johnson: “1. An ancient coin. 2. A piece stamped in honour of some remarkable performance” (Johnson 1755, 2.125).
For the first sense, Johnson cites an essay by Joseph Addison from The Guardian (1713), where he claims the Romans’ “medals were their current money. When an action deserved to be recorded on a coin, it was stamped perhaps upon an hundred thousand pieces of money, like our shillings, or half-pence, which were issued out of the mint, and became current” ([1713] (1882), 2.71). Johnson’s second definition of “medal” is actually what Addison calls a “medallion,” a unique piece given to a particular recipient, “an Honour which the World perhaps knows nothing of”: “There is generally but one coin stamped up on the occasion which is made a present to the person who is celebrated on it” (Addison [1713] (1882), 2.71).
Medallic awards had been made sporadically to soldiers and sailors in the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, under the Commonwealth, and after the battles of La Hogue (1692) and Culloden (1746) (Hawkins 1885, 1.301-2, 390-1, 398-400, 451, 503-4, 616; Encyclopædia Britannica 1910-11, 18.5). The systematic distribution of service medals hung by a ribbon on uniforms was, however, a later development, originating with the East India Company in the 1780s and given government sanction in the Napoleonic wars (Encyclopædia Britannica 1910-11, 18.3-18). Modern collectors of medals now usually distinguish the two categories as “military” versus “commemorative” or “historical.”
The appearance of a category of commemorative pieces which did not serve as coinage dates from the Renaissance. Edward Hawkins, in his Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain and Ireland (1885), notes that pieces produced by Pisanello and his successors were “in no way descendants of the older [i.e., Roman] medallion” (Hawkins 1885, 1.ix). Renaissance medals were unrelated to coinage, purely commemorative of great persons and deeds, as well as larger, cast rather than struck, and “bolder in design, and much higher in relief” (Hawkins 1885, 1.ix; see also Jones 1979, 27). This type of medal does not appear in England until the reign of Henry VIII, when the medals were “commemorative chiefly of persons and not of events” (Hawkins 1885, 1.x). The latter come into play under Elizabeth, notably on medals celebrating the defeat of the Armada (Plate 1.20), and with the Stuarts (Plate 1.55), whose medallic record celebrates battles, peace treaties and British naval supremacy, as well as royal events like coronations, births, marriages and ceremonial entries.
Addison expanded on the similarities and differences between coins and medals in his influential Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (1726). He observes there: “no difference between Money and Medals. An old Roman had his purse full of the same pieces that we now preserve in Cabinets. Assoon [sic] as an Emperor had done any thing remarkable, it was immediately stamped on a Coin, and became current throughout his whole Dominions” (1726, 147). Modern coins could also become something more like medals through alteration—for example, when polished smooth and re-engraved to serve as love tokens or to express political dissent (often Jacobite). Even where the new inscription was innocuous, this was a risky practice; in eighteenth-century Britain, it was a capital offence to deface the image of the monarch on a coin (Blackstone [1765–69] (2016) 4.88-90).
Antiquaries’ interest in medieval and later coins and medals reflects the Society’s larger purpose: “the Encouragement Advancement and furtherance of the Study and Knowledge of Antiquities and History of this and other Countries” (Society of Antiquaries, SAL/06/01).1 While we may think of antiquaries as sifting through the remains of the distant past, this is only partly true. Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) were, by education, disposed to place the highest value on the literary and material remains of ancient Greece and Rome, but they were as much moderns as ancients because they explored the post-Roman history of Britain (and other countries). In the case of Vetusta Monumenta’s coverage of coins and medals, this took them up to the reign of Charles I, just within living memory in 1717 (Plate 1.55). While collectors tended to concentrate on ancient coins, modern coins and medals were found in the cabinets of virtuosi like Martin Folkes (1690-1754) and Horace Walpole (1717-1797) (Catalogue 1756; Walpole 1784, 39-40; Strawberry Hill 1842, 96-112).
Eighteenth-century antiquaries would have considered these “modern” numismatic pieces in much the same way as the medals of classical antiquity. As Addison observed in the Dialogues, medals offer moral lessons from “a body of history” (1726, 20). They provide a record of “great persons,” the chronology of rulers and events, and historical detail (admittedly some of it trivial, like the features of costume) that was often more reliable than written accounts (1726, 13, 15-17, 21). This point was also made in the previous century in John Evelyn’s Numismata (1697), where the “Use of Medals” is either “for Money, or to preserve the Memory of worthy Actions” (1697, 3).2 Numismatics can offer an account of “the great actions of Peace that turned to the good of the People, as well as those of War,” which is found not only in the productions of the Roman emperors but also in the extensive series of official medals struck by the Paris mint in Addison’s own day to celebrate the glories of Louis XIV, both in war and peace (Addison 1726, 13, 26,149-50, 161-3).3
Addison suggests in the Dialogues that Great Britain had “neglected” to do something similar, a point he had made earlier in The Guardian (1713): “The English have not been so careful as other polite Nations to preserve the Memory of their great Actions and Events on Medals” (1726, 150; [1713] (1882), 2.72). Alexander Pope accordingly asked, in his prefatory verses to Addison’s Dialogues
Both Addison and Pope are, in fact, forgetting what had been seen recently on British coins and medals. Queen Anne’s coinage had included the inscription “VIGO” to commemorate the British victory over the French and Spanish in 1702 and, with a tiny elephant under the royal profile, indicated the African source of the gold for her guineas (Oman 1931, 345). Queen Anne’s mint consciously imitated the grand project of her cousin the Sun King, on a lesser scale, by issuing medals celebrating victories over the French and the Pretender as well as the Union with Scotland, the Peace of Utrecht, and the Queen’s bounty to the English clergy (Hone 2016; Cocano 2024). The senior line of Anne’s family also understood the medal’s value for advancing the political agenda of Jacobite restoration, aware of both official French and papal medallic propaganda (Woolf, 1988; Whitman and Varriano, 1981). Commercial medal-makers also come into the picture. Jean-Antoine Dassier’s series of English and British monarchs, for example, was intended as an educational record of history but also as an endorsement of the Whig view of dynastic succession (Hawkins, 1.1-2; Eisler 2010, 184-89).
Oh when shall Britain, conscious of her claim,
Stand emulous of Greek and Roman fame?
In living medals see her wars enroll’d,
And vanquish’d realms supply recording Gold? (Pope [c. 1713] (1963), 216)
Addison did note some differences between the medallic practices of the ancients and moderns, however. The Romans were never satiric, unlike the English and continental medallists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who frequently lampooned James II and his son in particular (Addison 1726, 150-3; Woolf 1988, 6-7, 16, 20-1). The Romans also refrained from depicting “any private person that was not some way related to the Imperial family” (Addison 1726, 153). Modern medals, taking their lead from the Italian Renaissance, often celebrated non-royal worthies. This could take the form of vanity commissions by the eminent themselves, like Folkes, Baron Philipp von Stosch, Conyers Middleton or the Grand Tourist brothers John and Richard Molesworth (Hawkins 1885, 2.390-1, 460-1, 571). Commercial makers also struck medals of the famous for sale to the public, like Dassier’s medals of Folkes and Pope, or attempted to cash in on current events, like the low-end die-sinkers who documented the course of the rebellion of 1745-46 (Hawkins 1885, 2.558, 565-6; Woolf 1988, 92-100, 104-09).4
Owners of medals could also invest them with sacred or talismanic value that was personal to the individual, like the specially minted gold (or silver, for the exiled Stuarts) pieces that were used in the ritual “touching” by the monarch as a cure for scrofula; until his death, Johnson wore on a ribbon around his neck the touchpiece he received as a child from the hands of Queen Anne in 1712.5 Medals of Charles I and his Jacobite descendants, partly intended to promote the Stuarts’ restoration agenda, also functioned as badges of identity to show to fellow travellers and, for many, as quasi-religious tokens of loyalty and devotion. As objects that carried legal risk (the maker, distributor and possessor of them could be liable for sedition), medals expressing support for the exiled Stuarts were what Miguel Tamen memorably calls “things of danger” (2001, 78).
For Addison, antiquaries, and their contemporaries, coins and medals offered a wealth of historical and moral content, but what can they tell us? Like many of the decorative arts, numismatic objects have until recently tended to be undervalued or perhaps even ignored, in spite of their unusual and often compelling combination of images and inscriptions. As Pope wrote in his verses for Addison: “The verse and sculpture bore an equal part, / And Art reflected images to Art” (Pope [c. 1713] (1963), 216).
Coins and medals do suffer from some disadvantages, however. Their small size can be a positive attribute (they are portable, mostly durable, capable of wide distribution) but also a drawback; they tend to end up locked away in the drawers of cabinets, unseen. Even when displayed, small bronze discs in large numbers can blend together in seeming uniformity. They are often placed at awkwardly low heights for viewing, or without the benefit of magnification. The Defaced! Money, Conflict, Protest exhibition of altered coins and banknotes from the Fitzwilliam Museum, as mounted at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2024, showed a number of objects inconveniently at waist-height. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, takes a refreshing approach, floating Jacobite medals at eye-level between the two layers of a transparent room divider.
If we make the effort to examine coins and medals carefully, we can draw historical information and perhaps moral lessons in the way that Evelyn and Addison did, and we can often derive considerable aesthetic pleasure from their design and execution. Coins and medals are also important evidence of the reception of ideas and beliefs; the wear on many specimens, and their number, will give an indication of circulation and currency (if you will) that may not be possible with printed material. Or the lack of wear, and the degree of surface toning, will indicate that a piece lay in the cabinet of a collector. Much of the decorative art in museums is heavily weighted in favour of products intended for elite audiences, as these tend to survive better than mass-market or homemade pieces, especially those intended for use rather than decoration. Coins and medals, in contrast, penetrated all sectors of society. A single gold medal presented by a king to an ambassador is one thing, but there are also the much more numerous pieces in base metals like bronze, copper, lead and tin that reached a wider public.
As Jim Deetz expresses it:
It is terribly important that the ‘small things forgotten’ be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured. We must remember these bits and pieces, and we must use them in new and imaginative ways so that a different appreciation for what life is today, and was in the past, can be achieved. The written document has its proper and important place, but there is also a time when we should set aside our perusal of diaries, court records, and inventories, and listen to another voice. (Deetz 1977, 161)6Members of the SAL knew this, with their focus on the material record of the antiquities of Great Britain, including its monuments, portraits, prints, maps, seals and—not least—its coins and medals.
Notes:
[1]: I am grateful to Becky Lougheed FSA, Kat Petersen FSA and Frank Waterton FSA at the Society for information about the Charter and for providing photographs.
[2]: For recent discussion of numismatics (especially as understood by Evelyn and Addison), see Stewart (1998, 166); Benedict (2015, 65-83); Silver (2015, 331-42); Lake (2020, 79-108; 2022).
[3]: For the medals of Louis XIV, see Divo (1982), de Turckheim-Pey (2004), Wellington (2016), Loskoutoff (2016-2023).
[4]: See Roos (2021, 184); Molesworth (2005); Forrer (1904-30, 2.467, 3.587, 4.681, 6.154); Morton and Eden (2024, lot 401). I am grateful to Ulf R. Hansson, Director of the Swedish Institute for Classical Studies in Rome, for information about the medals of Stosch.
[5]: On touching, see Farquhar (1916, 1917, 1918, 1919-20); Bloch (1973, 181-92; 208-13; 219-22; 238-43); Woolf, (1998, 39, 50, 77, 125, 135-6; 1990); Shaw (2006, 64-73); Guthrie (2012, 90-111).
[6]: See also Prown (2001, 73-84).
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