The Royal Mint Museum comprises a collection of some 100,000 coins and medals, as well as the drawings, dies and machinery that form part of the minting process.
The museum houses a collection of coins that contains many of the outstanding rarities of the British coinage, such as the 1933 penny, the Una and the Lion five pounds of 1839, the Queen Anne Vigo five guineas of 1703, and the proposed coins of Edward VIII.
But it is also a collection that reflects the international nature of the work of the Mint. All the scores of countries for whom the Mint has struck coins are represented in what is a truly global numismatic collection.
As historians of the Mint, the curators of the Museum are also interested in the people who have worked in the Mint while it has been at Llantrisant, when it was at Tower Hill in London and, centuries ago, when it was within the walls of the Tower of London. Isaac Newton, for example, was Master of the Mint for almost thirty years during the early eighteenth century. The famous scientists Sir John Herschel and Thomas Graham have also held the position of Master of the Mint.
Anything, in fact, that relates to the Mint is of interest to the Museum, from postcards to balances, from watch-cases to sculptures. The Museum has nineteenth-century chairs and eighteenth-century pistols; it has machines that were designed to give change for gold coins and a collection of seals that dates back to William the Conqueror.
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