GREAT BRITAIN Maundy set 1943

Description

There is a tradition in England that the Monarch bathes the feet of unfortunates and gives them a bit of money in a church ceremoney on the Thursday before Easter, when Jesus attended the Last Supper. Special coins have been made for this ceremony since the 18th century.

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.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of local autonomy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes, stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.

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.