English Gold Coin: A Journey Through The Ages.

The British sovereign coin can be easily accorded the status of most popular gold coin in the world. The English gold coin was first issued by Henry VII and has since become one of the easiest to recognize coins in the world. The coin carries an image of the ruling king or queen at the time when the coin was issued. This is the reason it was given the designation sovereign. This is one of the few gold coins which is regularly minted as of the year 2007.

At the time of its issue, the English gold coin weighed about 15.6 grams and the gold content was 23 carat. In the year 1604, the minting of sovereign was halted. It was only in 1817, that the coin was started again. This time its weight was almost halved at 7.32 grams. Most of the post 1817 gold sovereigns feature the ruling monarch on obverse and St. George slaying a dragon on the reverse.

By the coming of World War 1, a large number of English gold coins had been minted. From the First World War until1932, only select branches of the Royal Mint were allowed to produce the sovereign. These were the mints located at Perth, Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Bombay in India, Ottawa in Canada and Pretoria in South Africa. Pretoria was the last to stop regular coinage in 1932.

The coinage again resumed in 1957 and today only the three Royal Mint facilities located at Pontyclun, Wales and Mid-Glamorgan can legally mint the English gold coin. These coins are minted under heavy security. The personnel who work in the mint are not allowed to use coins in the mint complex. Rather they have to use plastic tokens in the office canteen.

More than 45,000 coins were minted in 2005. The present British sovereign is an alloy with 22 carat Crown gold. There are 11 gold parts per 12 parts and the remaining one part is copper. The degree of purity of sovereigns is regulated in a very stringent manner. This is the reason that it is valued highly as compared to other coins like the Krugerrand.

The English gold coin has also been subject to a number of attempts at counterfeiting. It is easy to remove gold from the sovereign and in case of double and quintuple gold coins, the process was easier still. There have been a number of cases where different chemicals and filing techniques have been used to extract gold. The most common is by making a small hole in the coin. After the gold is removed, the coin is filled with other metals and the hole is patched.

The English gold coin also carries a grand reputation in the area of numismatics and coin collection.