A SURPRISE “GALYHALPENS” FIND ON MY DORSET FARM

By Graham Birch

In recent issues, of Spink Insider magazine there have been stories about metal detecting finds and some readers might recall that I wrote one of these back in the Winter 2022 edition. Entitled “Searching for the next Henry III gold penny” That piece was a write up of a metal detecting “Treasure Hunting” day that Spink held on my farm in the Winterborne Valley of North Dorset. At the time Spink was promoting my book “The Metal in Britain’s Coins” (Spink 2020) and we invited some fortunate detectorists who had purchased the tome to try their luck in my fields. The search went amazingly well, and over six hours we found all sorts of English coins including six hammered silver examples ranging in age from Henry III to Elizabeth I. The field we searched is called “Farmhead” which is a corruption of the words “Fair Meadow” and it was the site of the annual fair from the adjacent village of Winterborne Whitechurch – a settlement mentioned in the Domesday book. This makes Farmhead a great field for a search and you never know what will turn up next.

My farm is a commercial scale arable enterprise, and we have crops growing almost all year round. So, access to the field for metal detecting is only possible for a few short weeks between the completion of harvest and the new winter crop becoming sown and established. This autumn I was keen to try my luck and see what else the field might yield – but I knew I had to hurry.

I was accompanied on this year’s hunt by my young grandson Wilf – who loves collecting all sorts of things and is undoubtedly a Spink customer of the future. At the age of five though his threshold for what counts as treasure is set very low and he was more than delighted with our first find of the day – a “young head” Victorian farthing in quite decent condition (albeit with a dark green patina). Next up was a lead musket ball which subsequently caused quite a stir at Wilf’s infant school “show and tell”. Thereafter the finds dried up and with Wilf starting to flag a little I said to him “one last coin and we pack up”. A few minutes later and the detector beeped. Out of the hole came the smallest hammered silver coin that I have ever seen. And what’s more it was clearly not English.

Weighing just 0.3 grams and with a diameter of only 12 mm this little coin makes our smallest modern circulation denominations – seem very large in comparison. Initially I had no idea what the coin was but luckily for me, iphones have a feature called “Google Lens” which, given a clear photograph, can identify pretty much anything. Within a matter of seconds, Google Lens declared the mystery coin to be a Venetian soldini struck during the reign of the Doge Leonardo Loredan (1501-1518).

So, what is a 500-year old Venetian hammered silver coin doing in my Dorset field?

 It turns out that my soldini (translation = “little shilling”) is far from just being a rare chance loss dropped by a weary or careless Venetian traveller. The Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) – a database of “finds” maintained by the British Museum – currently has no less than 664 soldini recorded, mostly unearthed by metal detectorists A SURPRISE “GALYHALPENS” FIND ON MY DORSET FARM Graham Birch · WINTER 2024 47 such as me. Furthermore, the PAS examples are probably just the tip of the iceberg as many detecting finds go unreported. The find spots cover most of southern Britain all the way up to the Humber and with numbers this high, the soldini is a much more common find than the similar sized English halfpennies of the period (which are quite rare). It would seem therefore that soldini were in widespread circulation as small change in the face of an acute shortage of regular official halfpenny coins. The soldini even had a colloquial English name; “Galyhalpens” or “Galley Halfpence” after the Venetian Galley-men who imported them. In Adam Daubney’s excellent BNJ paper, he sets out the timelines and rationale for soldini import and circulation in England, noting that there were two big influxes of these Venetian coins – the first between 1400 and 1415 under Doge Michele Steno and the second in 1501-1521 under Doge Leonardo Loredan.

Venice the Superpower

Although modern Venice is now best known as a “top tier” holiday destination, it was not always thus. In late medieval and Tudor times Venice was a European political and economic superpower. With its strategic location at the northern end of the Adriatic, Venice was almost invulnerable to seaborne attack, and it was able to build up one of the most powerful navies in the history of medieval Europe. In time this sea power allowed Venice to conquer territory throughout the Mediterranean and exert control over trading routes to the Arabic world and indirectly to India. This control over Asian spices and silks brought immense wealth to the Venetian nobility and its financial stability together with its geographic position made Venice a hub of international trade and banking. Venetian currency was trusted throughout Europe and the Venetian gold ducat design was so popular that it remained unchanged for 500 years from its introduction in 1284 to the takeover of Venice by Napoleon in 1797. Even the diminutive soldini coin from my field has a broadly similar design to the gold ducat – with a standing figure of Jesus on the obverse and a kneeling Doge receiving a blessing and a flag from St Mark on the reverse.

The military and economic might that Venice was able to project meant that its convoys of trading galleys were able to range far and wide in search of mercantile profit – largely unhindered. Few of the European powers had either the inclination or the ability to push back against Venice. The nature of Venetian influence, where wealth and power were highly concentrated within a few super-rich families, became infamous throughout Europe and its exotic character attracted the attention of William Shakespeare who in the 1590’s used the city as the setting for his play “The Merchant of Venice”. This play – with its grotesque plot and larger than life principal characters – has been in near continuous production ever since and it gives us a glimpse of how Venice must have been viewed in Tudor England.

“Anybody who is lucky enough to hold a soldini in their hand will instantly realise how easy it would be to lose”

The truth though about Venetian trading was perhaps more humdrum than Shakespeare would have us believe. In the case of the Venice-England trade of the 15th and 16th centuries, galleys would set off from Venice in May carrying cargoes of luxury goods such as spices and silks – some of which had already crossed two continents in their journey. These would be offloaded in London or other south coast ports and sold for good prices – Tudor England knew how to spend money lavishly. The Venetian traders would then purchase a return cargo comprising English wool and woollen cloth (the best in Europe) as well as other scarce English speciality commodities such as tin. The galleys then returned home to Venice in August or early September.

For the Venetian traders, the soldini were useful as “small change” in their transactions and they brought big bags of them on each voyage to pass off as halfpennies – thereby solving a problem for their English trade counterparties while at the same time earning a little extra profit on each voyage (the soldini had less intrinsic value than an English halfpenny).

Where did all the soldini go?

The soldini were clearly useful in England, and were theoretically available in large quantities so why are they virtually absent from English coin collectors’ cabinets today? The answer to this lies in their official suppression. During the first influx of Doge Steno soldini, the authorities in London become irked by the popularity of these little coins which were lighter than regal issues and struck in a different alloy. Henry IV instructed the sheriffs at the ports of London, Sandwich and Dover to seize and confiscate any soldini that they found, and this would have certainly discouraged their use. In 1416 the English Government went even further and persuaded the Venetian Senate to expressly forbid the export of soldini to London. PAS evidence of soldini finds show that these measures must have been successful as coins struck by Doges in power after 1416 are seldom encountered. Any coins remaining in circulation would have likely been called in and scrapped during the recoinage of 1464-66.

Coins like the one I found formed part of the second influx – nearly a century after the first. These entered England mainly through Southampton which by this time had become the Venetian’s favoured port city. Again, the authorities clamped down hard and supressed the coins but not in time to prevent them circulating along the south coast and beyond. Unless they were lost like mine, these soldini would have been taken out of circulation and scrapped during the recoinage which began in England in 1526.

Why I like my soldini.

Most coin collectors know that not all expensive coins are interesting and not all interesting coins are expensive. My soldini would perhaps be worth only £30 or so as an eBay item but in some respects, it is every bit as noteworthy as the Venetian gold ducats that are such a regular sight in Spink’s high-end coin auctions.

Anybody who is lucky enough to hold a soldini in their hand will instantly realise how easy it would be to lose. It is so small, thin and light that it is almost begging to slip through the fingers and on to the ground. Yet it is quite nicely made and has an elegant design which doubtless appealed to the English who were suffering from a shortage of small change. The spending power of a soldini was low so it would have been only mildly annoying for its original owner to lose it. But a lot of fun for me and my grandson Wilf to find it and discover its story

By Graham Birch