If you know how to read the symbols and letters on this Charles III coin properly,
they can tell you a wealth of historical stories, covering everything from saints,
to legends, to epic battles that decided the destiny of the British Isles. Furthermore,
what isn’t shown is as important as what is. In this week’s video from History Calling I’m
going to reveal what this little piece of metal can teach us about UK history
and ask how have British coins changed since the death of the Queen and how have they not?
After the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022, the Royal Mint which is
currently based in based in Llantrisant, Wales and which issues coinage within the United Kingdom,
got to work on designing and producing a new suite of coins which would feature the name and
likeness of King Charles III. By 28 October the BBC was reporting that manufacturing on the coins
had begun and that those intended for general circulation would be released to the public by the
end of the year, which they were. The UK currently uses eight different coins, assuming we discard
special commemorative coins which are technically legal tender but which are issued as keepsakes and
collectors’ items and which I have literally never seen used in a shop or received in my change.
The coins in common usage are a penny, a two pence piece, five pence, ten pence, twenty pence,
fifty pence, one pound and a two-pound coin. Only 50p coins were initially struck with Charles III’s
face on them, along with a commemorative £5 coin. More will be created as the roughly 27
billion UK coins currently in circulation wear out and need to be replaced, but for now, you
will most likely only see the King’s face on the 50 pence pieces which are the focus of this video.
The mere fact that there are any coins in circulation with someone other than
Queen Elizabeth II on them is a novel situation for anyone born after 1971.
This is because in that year the UK went through the process of decimalisation. At
that time the previous coinage system, which used pounds, shillings and pence (12 pence in
a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound) was abandoned. It was replaced with what
I consider to be the much simpler metric system, which has 100 pennies in a pound.
Prior to that, one could theoretically have coins in one’s pocket dating back to Queen
Victoria’s reign which were still valid. As no one but Queen Elizabeth had ever reigned
between 1971 and 2022, there has never been any other monarch on UK decimal coinage, until now.
Starting with the heads side of the coin, we see an image of Charles based on photographs taken of
him for his 70th birthday in 2018 and created by sculptor Martin Jennings. Mr Jennings said that:
It is a privilege to sculpt the first official effigy of His Majesty and to
receive his personal approval for the design.
The portrait was sculpted from a photograph of The King, and was inspired by the iconic effigies that
have graced Britain’s coins over the centuries. It is the smallest work I have created, but it
is humbling to know it will be seen and held by people around the world for centuries to come.
Keen observers will notice some differences in the layout of a Queen Elizabeth II 50p piece and
a Charles III one. Both show the monarchs’ heads and necks only, but traditionally,
the new sovereign faces in the opposite direction from their predecessor and so Charles faces to the
left, while Elizabeth always faced to the right. It is also traditional that while a Queen wears
a crown in images of her on coinage, a King does not and so Charles appears bare headed,
though Elizabeth always had some form of royal headwear on (I say some form of headwear,
because the first coins struck with her image, prior to decimalisation, depicted her in a
Romanesque laurel wreath rather than a modern crown, as you see here). A minuscule set of
initials next to the monarch’s head acknowledges who created the image of them you see on the coin
and in Charles’s case, these are MJ, to represent the Martin Jennings mentioned a minute ago.
If we now turn our attention to the letters given around the monarch’s
head and alongside their name, again we can see some similarities and some differences.
The text on Elizabeth’s coin starts at the top right and reads (and I’m going to expand
the abbreviated Latin words here, even though you see the abbreviations onscreen): Elizabeth II Dei
Gratia Regina Fidei Defensatrix. It translates to ‘Elizabeth II Reigning by the Grace of God,
Defender of the Faith’. Charles’ coin has letters which translate to the same thing
(with his name in place of his mother’s of course), but the Latin has been abbreviated
in a different way and we see Charles III D.G. REX F.D., with the Rex meaning King in
place of the REG seen on Elizabethan coinage which means Regina, the Latin word for Queen.
The way in which this Latin text is presented on coins changes over the years though and you
can get coins with Elizabeth’s head on them, which say D.G. instead of Fid. Def. meaning
Fidei Defensatrix. Defender of the Faith is a title which was originally granted to King
Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 after Henry wrote a pamphlet defending the Catholic faith
against the preachings of Martin Luther, who was one of the founding fathers of Protestantism.
Although the Papacy revoked the title after Henry split from the Church in Rome in the 1530s,
which ironically led to England becoming a primarily Protestant country, he had the
English parliament reissue it to him and it has remained with the English, later British monarchy
ever since. See my video on the history of the title for more details. Elizabeth’s coin also has
the year it was struck on the heads side, while Charles’s instead has the denomination, 50 pence.
Before we switch to the other side of the coin, if you’re enjoying this content and want more
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Moving onto the tails side of the coin, which offers even more symbolism and history.
The design has been copied from a coronation coin struck in 1953 to mark the crowning of
Elizabeth II and therefore provides a nice link from one reign to the next,
with the only significant difference being the year. Indeed the fact that the 1953 coin had its
year on the tails side, rather than the heads, might explain why Charles’s 50p has presented
this information in that way, rather than having the year on the heads side, as is usual.
It shows the four quarters of the royal coat of arms, each presented within its own shield.
These depict the three passant guardant lions of England in the first and fourth quarters (the use
of three lions for England dates back to Henry II’s time); the rampant lion of Scotland in the
second quarter (this has been in use in Scottish heraldry since at least the 1220s) and a harp for
Ireland in the fourth quarter. The harp, which of course also famously symbolises the Irish beer,
Guinness, had been made a heraldic symbol of Ireland by Henry VIII when he upgraded
that country from an English lordship to a kingdom under English control. Like Scotland,
Ireland does of course have its own history of native Kings, but that’s another story.
The coin shows the English version of the arms. However, when the arms are shown in Scotland,
the first and fourth quarters show the Scottish symbol, while the English appears only once in the
second quarter. The harp remains as it is. There is no separate symbol for Wales in either version.
It is a principality rather than a kingdom and has been under a union with England for far longer
than Scotland and Ireland and is therefore (so the argument goes) represented by the English lions.
The latter two countries remained separate kingdoms until 1707 and 1801 respectively,
even though they were both effectively already under English control by those years.
The shields alternate with other symbols representing all four home nations of the United
Kingdom. These are a Tudor rose for England, a shamrock for Northern Ireland, a leek for Wales
and a thistle for Scotland. The history that these symbols represent spans hundreds, even thousands
of years and draws on stories connected to some of these countries’ most famous personages.
The Tudor rose is a composite of a red rose, once used to represent the House of Lancaster
during the 15th century Wars of the Roses and the white rose, used to represent the
House of York during the same conflict. They were combined to form the present symbol by Henry VII,
after he took the throne from Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
The shamrock has of course long been associated with Ireland and particularly our patron saint,
Patrick. This association is apocryphal though, as no contemporary evidence regarding Patrick’s
life mentions his use of this plant. Instead the earliest reference to him utilising it to explain
the concept of the trinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit dates to 1727, over a thousand years
after he lived. The association between the leek and the country of Wales likewise goes back so
far that we aren’t sure when or why it originated. Legend says that on the advice of St David, patron
saint of Wales, the 6th century king of Gwynedd ordered his soldiers to wear a leek on their
armour to differentiate them from those they were fighting during battle. This unsubstantiated myth
doesn’t appear in the written records until the 17th century however, so like the shamrock and St
Patrick, the dates are off by over a millennium. Another tale tells us that Edward of Woodstock,
Prince of Wales, often referred to as the Black Prince, won the Battle of Crécy against the French
in 1346 with the help of his Welsh archers, who fought in a field full of leeks. To remember their
victory, the Welsh therefore began to wear leeks on St David’s day, which is 1 March.
Whatever the leek’s true origins as a symbol of Wales, the connection was well established by
the Tudor era (the Tudors were a Welsh family remember) and there are payments in the royal
records for 15 shillings to one of Henry VIII’s yeoman of the guard for bringing his daughter Mary
a leek on St David’s Day in 1537, 1538 and 1544. By the time William Shakespeare wrote his play,
Henry V, in the 1590s the plant’s Welsh pedigree was so well established that one of the characters
referred to its use as an ancient custom and specifically cited the Battle of Crécy story.
Moving on to Scotland, the thistle has also been connected with that country for centuries,
but like Wales and the leek, or Ireland and the shamrock, the origins of said connection are quite
fuzzy. One popular story goes that when Norsemen invaded Scotland in 1263 and were sneaking up on
sleeping clansmen to do battle, one of them stepped on a thistle and cried out in pain,
waking the Scots and preventing them from suffering defeat. Instead,
they ultimately prevailed at the Battle of Largs. I can’t tell you if that is true or not,
but we are on more solid ground by the time we get to James III, who ruled from 1460 to 1488 and
who adopted the thistle as the royal plant badge. It began appearing on coinage in the early 1470s,
was incorporated into the Great Seal of Scotland by Mary Queen of Scots and gives its name to the
Scottish chivalric order, the Order of the Thistle. This side of the coin also has tiny
initials on it to indicate who designed parts of it with EF appearing below the lower left shield
and standing for Edgar Fuller, and CT below the lower right shield standing for Cecil Thomas.
Sitting at the centre of all this symbolism is an image of a crown. Now I think this is the
long-lost Tudor crown, created for either Henry VII or more likely Henry VIII and destroyed by
the Parliamentarians in 1649 after the fall of the monarchy. It is seen here in an image of Charles
I and it has also been adopted as part of the official monogram for the current King Charles,
so its use on his coinage makes sense to me. In the course of researching this video though,
I saw a website which said it is St Edward’s crown, aka the coronation
crown and I can understand why, for there are striking similarities between the two.
However the arches on the coin’s crown look very rounded to me, like those on the Tudor crown,
so I still think that’s what we’re seeing. Let me below if you agree or disagree.
As you can see, there’s a lot going on on this little coin and far more history
on it that I think most people realise. I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about it and
that you get the chance to examine one of the Charles III 50ps (and the other
coins which will be issued with his face on them in due course) in person. Before I go,
thank you as always to those of you who support me on Patreon or by making one-off donations
using the thanks button below videos. Remember to let me know in the comments if you think the
coin’s crown is the Tudor or St Edward’s crown and for more on the history of English royalty, try
one of these options next. Whatever you select, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.