MOULDS of moneyers are frames full of sand, in which the plates of metal are cast which are intended to serve for striking species of gold and silver.
A sort of concave moulds made of clay, having within them the figures and inscriptions of ancient Roman coins, are found in many parts of England, and supposed to have been used for casting money. Mr Baker having been favoured with a sight of some of these moulds discovered in Shropshire, bearing the same types and inscriptions with some of the Roman coins, gave an account of them to the Royal Society. They were found in digging for sand, at a place called Ryton in Shropshire, about a mile from the great Watling-street Road. They are all of the size of the Roman denarius, and of little more than the thickness of our halfpenny. They are made of a smooth pot or brick clay, which seems to have been first well cleansed from dirt and sand, and well beaten or kneaded, to render it fit for taking a fair impression. There were a great many of them found together, and some have not unfrequently been found in Yorkshire; but they do not seem to have been met with in any other place, except at Lyons, where several are said to have been discovered. They have been sometimes found in great numbers joined together side by side, on one flat piece of clay, as if intended for the casting of a great number of coins at once; and both these, and all the others that have been found, seem to have been of the Emperor Severus. They are sometimes found impressed on both sides, and several have the head of Severus on one side and a well-known reverse of his on the other. They seem plainly to have been intended for the coinage of money, though it is not easy to say in what manner they can have been employed for that purpose, especially those which have impressions on both sides, unless it may be supposed that they coined two pieces at the same time by
Moulds. the help of three moulds, of which this was to be the middle one. If, by disposing these into some sort of iron frame or case, as our letter-founders do the brass moulds for casting their types, the melted metal could be easily poured into them, it would certainly be a very easy method of coining, as such moulds require little time or expense to make them, and therefore new ones might be supplied as often as the old ones happened to break.
These moulds seem to have been burned or baked sufficiently to make them hard; but not so as to render them porous like our bricks, whereby they would have lost their smooth and even surface, which in these is plainly so close, that whatever metal should be formed in them would have no appearance like the sandholes by which counterfeit coins and metals are usually detected.