I saw a guy at a renaissance festival one time operating a mill / machine / device which dropped a heavy weight down a track that looked like a small guillotine, at the bottom he placed a mold and a blank coin. The impact of the weight striking the mold transfered the image onto the softer metal of the coin blank.
Any body know what this art/craft is called? It was fascinating to watch, and I’ve Goggled all sorts of terms concerning coins and can’t find anything on it.
I got the feeling that making coins in this manner had nothing to do with actual renaissance methods, but the apparatus looked primative enough that it fit in anyway.
Hmmm, my extensive knowledge of drop forging is 3 minutes and a couple of search engine hits old, but drop forging seems to entail using heated or molten metal. The blanks this guy was striking were cold.
Ethlrist, if your SCA friend can shed any light on this I’d love to hear about it. It seems like the sort of thing you’d be able to find online offered as a service…you know custom coins, you choose the front and the back and the material for a gift or keepsake.
On the map for our Faire, it’s called, quite simply, “Coin Strike.” Another term is “Drop Hammer Coin Mint.”
Took some hefty searching to pull it all together, but I found the guy who operates it, and - Huzzah! - they do custom designs, as well as having dozens of existing dies. See them here.
They claim that the stike is indeed authentic, and that was the first mechanized tool of the Renaissance era.
The other choice for coinage would be to have molten metal poured into molds, then cooled and cleaned up(removing flashing and such).
I imagine if you’ve got a few young apprentices working the press, you can crank you quite a few coins. It is also my understanding that modern coins are often worked this way, though with modern equipment, of course.
Tristan, former SCA geek who worked with an armorer who dabbled in coin minting, briefly.
Rainy: as a rabid former (and still occasional) Ren geek, my advice is that, while at a Fair, if you have questions, by all means ask. Most vendors/artisans/performers will be more than happy to tell you more than you ever desired to know about their art/craft/trade/instrument/sword/horse/etc./etc. It’s part of the reason they are there.
Heck, I’d garb up and wander around in a blissfull alcoholic haze, and have lots of visitors stop me and ask me questions about events and locations, as if I were on staff. I’d politely tell them what I knew, pose for a photo, and continue meandering from pub to pub (and wench to wench).
That sounds like an awful lot of work to go through just to stamp a coin. I think your guess is right, and this is just a renaissance-looking bit of show-offery.
When I visited Waterford, Ireland five years back, I finally got a chance to go in the tower there, and they had a guy stamping coins the old-fashioned way. He had an upper mold and a lower mold, a tube that went around them, a hammer and an anvuil. You put your coin blank between the two, slid the tube around the outside, put the whole shebang on the anvil and whalloped it with the hammer. Out springs a neatly minted coin. I’ve still got mine.
The minter said that they didn’t really used the outer sleeve back in the Old Days – they just lined up the upper and lower molds on either side of the blank and hit it. But the tube prevents the whole mess from coming apart in mid-strike, and keeps you from pinching your hand in there. There was no OSHA in the Renaissance, though.
(They were doing this because they used the Tower as a mint, among other things. And I know there’s no OSHA in Ireland. It’s an expression.)
The guys who do this at my Ren Faire (who, admittedly, may be the same guys who do it at your Ren Faire, since there’s a Faire circuit many of the full-timers travel…but I digress…) also claim historical accuracy with the method. I’ve seen 'em in full swing and they can pound coins out pretty quickly when being absolutely safe, and even faster if one guy is throwing the blanks in place and another operating the “thwacker.” (It’s supposed to be done all by one person to minimize the “Oops, sorry! I pulled the lever too soon! Is your hand OK?” factor.)
Given that there were less coins minted then, and old ones weren’t pulled out of circulation that quickly, and labor was really, really cheap, I don’t see why this couldn’t have been one of several methods for minting coins. It’s certainly faster than handstriking, like **CalMeacham **describes, and uses a lot less personal energy. The technique is identical (mold/blank/mold + “thack” = coin) the difference is between a sore shoulder and a thwacking device. Thwacking devices are always cool.
Oh, and ditto Ex-Tank. We loooooove to be asked questions about our work. Breaks up the endless monotony of standing around getting dusty. Plus, when someone asks me a question and I get to tell them interesting things, I do it in a loud enough voice that other people hear it too. When people are interested in stuff, they buy more stuff. Everyone wins.