Charles I. 1625-1649. AR crown. 29.91 gm. 42 mm. Type 1a. Tower mint under the King. Cross Calvary punched over lis / Cross Calvary i.m. 1626-1627. King on horseback left, holding sword over shoulder; CAROLVS D G MAG BRI FR ET HIB REX / Square-topped garnished shield over long cross fourchée; CHRISTO AVSPICE REGNO. S. 2753. N. 2190. FRC II*/VII. Good Very Fine; well struck and nicely toned on a broad flan; among the finer known of this early issue. Rare.

Ex Davissons Auction 30 (11 October 2011) lot 208Ex Michael S. Tallent Collection (Stack's, 24 April 2008, lot 50)Ex Colin Cooke.

This is an interesting transitional piece with a struck-over initial mark on the obverse that shows up rarely and then in less than appealing condition. Grant Francis, in the 1916 edition of The British Numismatic Journal discussing categories of the silver crowns issued by the Tower mint, followed Hawkins' work 75 years earlier where he described four main types and the varieties of those types. This first obverse type features a horseman with its stylistic debt to the crowns of James I. The reverse type is "from a new die, showing the extraordinary and unhappy division of the legend by the limbs of the cross." (Francis, p 183) Good quality examples of the variety are rare: Paget (1946), Nightingale (1951), Cooper, "coarse tooling...." (1978), to list three of the more important crown collections, offered examples inferior to this. Brooker's example (236) was inferior to this. Whetmore did not have the variety. Murdoch, lot 91, lists the type as "fine and rare," but does not provide an illustration.