old-fashioned way, by the hammer, the use of the mill having been probably laid aside on Briot's departure. "The unhappy situation of the king's affairs," says Leake, "may be traced by his money, which grew worse and worse in the stamp, till at last they hardly deserve the name of a coin, seeming rather the work of a smith (as perhaps they were) than a graver, and manifest they were coined in the greatest hurry and confusion." Besides money of the common species, various other coins or tokens, which have received the name of obsidional or siege pieces, were issued on different occasions by the royalists in the course of the war. Among these were the pieces stamped at Newark in 1643 and 1646, which are in the form of a lozenge; those stamped at the siege of Carlisle in 1645, which are octangular; the Pontefract pieces, some of which are round, some octangular, some lozenge-shaped; and another sort of money, consisting merely of bits of silver-plate about an inch and a half long, with a rude representation of a castle, supposed to be that of Scarborough, stamped upon it.
In the beginning of their quarrel with the king the parliament coined both gold and silver money bearing the usual impressions, and only distinguished from that issued by the king by its having the letter P. (for Parliament) stamped upon it as a mint mark. They afterwards coined gold pieces of twenty shillings, ten shillings, and five shillings, and silver crowns, half-crowns, shillings, and sixpences, having on the obverse an antique shield with St. George's cross, encircled with a palm and a laurel branch, and circumscribed The Commonwealth of England; on the reverse, two antique shields conjoined, the first with St. George's cross as before, the other with a harp, and circumscribed God with us. Their silver two-pences, pennies, and half-pennies, have only the arms without any legend or inscription. Such coins, with a sun for the mint-mark, are found of the dates 1649, 1650, 1651, 1652, and 1653; and it is supposed that they were occasionally struck even down to the Restoration: Leake says he had seen both a twenty and a ten shilling piece of 1660, This was all ham-
