GREAT BRITAIN, 1 shilling, 1871

Description

The mint was putting die numbers on silver coins in the middle of the 19th century to keep track of experiments they were doing with metallurgy and minting techniques.

England has a tradition of using coins from the Celtic times of the first century BC. It began to be styled “Great Britain” after the union with Scotland in 1709. From the 1970s the term “United Kingdom” (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) has become the normally used name for the country.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.