Royal Mint
The Royal Mint is the United Kingdom's official maker of British coins. It is currently located in Llantrisant, Wales, where it moved in 1968.
Operating under the legal name The Royal Mint Limited, it is a limited company that is wholly owned by His Majesty's Treasury and is under an exclusive contract to supply the nation's coinage. As well as minting circulating coins for the UK and international markets, The Royal Mint is a leading provider of precious metal products.
The Royal Mint was historically part of a series of mints that became centralised to produce coins for the Kingdom of England, all of Great Britain, the United Kingdom, and nations across the Commonwealth.
The Royal Mint operated within the Tower of London for several hundred years before moving to what is now called Royal Mint Court, where it remained until the 1960s. As Britain followed the rest of the world in decimalising its currency, the Mint moved from London to a new 38-acre plant in Llantrisant, Glamorgan, Wales, where it has remained since.
Since 2018 The Royal Mint has been evolving its business to help offset declining cash use. It has expanded into precious metals investment, historic coins, and luxury collectibles, which saw it deliver an operating profit of £12.7 million in 2020–2021.
In 2022 The Royal Mint announced it was building a new plant in South Wales to recover precious metals from electronic waste. The first of this sustainably sourced gold is already being used in a new jewellery division – 886 by The Royal Mint – named in celebration of its symbolic founding date.
History
Origin
The history of coins in Great Britain can be traced back to the second century BC when they were introduced by Celtic tribes from across the English Channel. The first record of coins being minted in Britain is attributed to Kentish tribes such as the Cantii who around 80–60 BC imitated those of Marseille through casting instead of hammering. After the Romans began their invasion of Britain in AD 43, they set up mints across the land, which produced Roman coins for some 40 years before closing. A mint in London reopened briefly in 383 until closing swiftly as Roman rule in Britain came to an end. For the next 200 years, no coins appear to have been minted in Britain until the emergence of English kingdoms in the sixth and seventh centuries. By 650, as many as 30 mints are recorded across Britain.1279 to 1672
In 1279, the country's numerous mints were unified under a single system whereby control was centralised to the mint within the Tower of London. Mints outside London were reduced, with only a few local and episcopal mints continuing to operate. Pipe rolls containing the financial records of the London mint show an expenditure of and records of timber bought for workshops.Individual roles at the mint were well established by 1464. The master worker was charged with hiring engravers and managing moneyers, while the Warden was responsible for witnessing the delivery of dies. A specialist mint board was set up in 1472 to enact a 23 February indenture that vested the mint's responsibilities into three main roles: a warden, a master and comptroller.
In the early 16th century, mainland Europe was in the middle of an economic expansion, but England was suffering from financial difficulties brought on by excessive government spending. By the 1540s, wars with France and Scotland led Henry VIII to enact The Great Debasement, which saw the amount of precious metal in coins significantly reduced. In order to strengthen control of the country's currency, monasteries were dissolved, which effectively ended major coin production outside London.
In 1603, the Union of Crowns of England and Scotland under King James I led to a partial union of the two kingdoms' currencies, the pound Scots and the pound sterling. Because Scotland had heavily debased its silver coins, a Scots mark was worth just pence while an English mark was worth 6 shillings 8 pence. To bridge the difference between the values, unofficial supplementary token coins, often made from lead, were made by unauthorised minters across the country. By 1612, there were 3,000 such unlicensed mints producing these tokens, none of them paying anything to the government. The Royal Mint, not wanting to divert manpower from minting more profitable gold and silver coins, hired outside agent Lord Harington who, under license, started issuing copper farthings in 1613. Private licenses to mint these coins were revoked in 1644, which led traders to resume minting their own supplementary tokens. In 1672, the Royal Mint finally took over the production of copper coinage.
Civil War mints
In 1630, sometime before the outbreak of the English Civil War, England signed a treaty with Spain that ensured a steady supply of silver bullion to the Tower mint. Additional branch mints to aid the one in London were set up, including one at Aberystwyth Castle in Wales. In 1642, parliament seized control of the Tower mint. After Charles I tried to arrest the Five Members, he was forced to flee London and established at least 16 emergency mints across the British Isles in Carlisle, Chester, Colchester, Cork, Dublin, Edinburgh, Exeter, Newark, Pontefract, Salisbury, Scarborough, parts of Cornwall including Truro, Weymouth, Worcester, and York.After raising the royal standard in Nottingham, marking the beginning of the civil war, Charles called on loyalist mining engineer Thomas Bushell, the owner of a mint and silver mine in Aberystwyth, to move his operations to the royalist-held Shrewsbury, possibly within the grounds of Shrewsbury Castle. However, this mint was short-lived, operating for no more than three months before Charles ordered Bushell to relocate the mint to his headquarters in the royal capital of Oxford. The new Oxford mint was established on 15 December 1642 in New Inn Hall, the present site of St Peter's College. There, silver plates and foreign coins were melted down and, in some cases, just hammered into shape to produce coins quickly. Bushell was appointed the mint's warden and master-worker, and he laboured alongside notable engravers Nicholas Briot, Thomas Rawlins and Nicholas Burghers, the last of whom was appointed Graver of Seals, Stamps, and Medals in 1643. When Prince Rupert took control of Oxford that same year, Bushell was ordered to move to Bristol Castle, where he continued minting coins until it fell to parliamentary control on 11 September 1645, effectively ending Bushell's involvement in the civil war mints.
In November 1642, the king ordered royalist MP Richard Vyvyan to build one or more mints in Cornwall, where he was instructed to mint coins from whatever bullion could be obtained and deliver them to Ralph Hopton, a commander of royalist troops in the region. Vyvyan built a mint in Truro and was its Master until 1646, when it was captured by parliamentarians. In December 1642, the parliamentarians set up a mint in nearby Exeter, which had been under parliamentary control since the beginning of the war and was under constant threat of attack by loyalist troops. In September 1643, the town was captured by the Cornish Royalist Army led by Prince Maurice, leading Vyvyan to move his nearby mint in Truro to the captured town. The exact location of the mint in Exeter is unknown; however, maps from the time show a street named Old Mint Lane near Friernhay, which was to be the site of a 1696 Recoinage mint. Much less is known about the mint's employees, with only Richard Vyvyan and clerk Thomas Hawkes recorded.
Following Charles I's execution in 1649, the newly formed Commonwealth of England established its own set of coins, which for the first time used English rather than Latin and were more plainly designed than those issued under the monarchy. The government invited French engineer Peter Blondeau, who worked at the Paris Mint, to come to London in 1649 in the hope of modernising the country's minting process. In France, hammer-stuck coins had been banned from the Paris Mint since 1639 and replaced with milled coinage. Blondeau began his testing in May 1651 in Drury House. He initially produced milled silver pattern pieces of half-crowns, shillings and sixpences; however rival moneyers continued using the old hammering method. In 1656, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ordered engraver Thomas Simon to cut a series of dies featuring his bust and for them to be minted using the new milled method. Few of Cromwell's coins entered circulation; Cromwell died in 1658 and the Commonwealth collapsed two years later. Without Cromwell's backing of milled coinage, Blondeau returned to France, leaving England to continue minting hammer-struck coins.
1660 to 1805
In 1662, after previous attempts to introduce milled coinage into Britain had failed, the restored monarch Charles II recalled Peter Blondeau to establish a permanent machine-made coinage. Despite the introduction of the newer, milled coins, like the old hammered coins they suffered heavily from counterfeiting and clipping. To combat this the text Decus et tutamen was added to some coin rims.After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when James II was ousted from power, parliament took over control of the mint from the Crown, which had until then allowed the mint to act as an independent body producing coins on behalf of the government.
Under the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, Isaac Newton became the mint's warden in 1696. His role, intended to be a sinecure, was taken seriously by Newton, who went about trying to combat the country's growing problems with counterfeiting. By this time, forgeries accounted for 10% of the country's coinage, clipping was commonplace and the value of the silver in coins had surpassed their face value. King William III initiated the Great Recoinage of 1696 whereby all coins were removed from circulation, and enacted the Coin Act 1696, making it high treason to own or possess counterfeiting equipment. Satellite mints to aid in the recoinage were established in Bristol, Chester, Exeter, Norwich, and York, with returned coins being valued by weight, not face value.
The Acts of Union 1707 united England and Scotland into one country, leading London to take over production of Scotland's currency and thus replacing Scotland's Pound Scots with the English Pound sterling. As a result, the Edinburgh mint closed on 4 August 1710. As Britain's empire continued to expand, so too did the need to supply its coinage. This, along with the need for new mint machinery and cramped conditions within the Tower of London, led to plans for the mint to move to nearby East Smithfield.