On the Close Rolls there is an entry of a writ, 26 June 1414, stating that the merchants of Venice who came over in their galleys, used to bring their own money of Venice, called galley halfpence; and directing the Mayor of London to enjoin them not to circulate this money here--they must take it to the Mint to be converted into English coin. There were many prohibitions of these ‘galey halpenys’, from Proclamations in 1399 and 1400 to an Act of Parliament in 1519; and these repeated prohibitions show that there were many such coins about.
Gold moidores from Portugal were afterwards in circulation here at 27_s._ apiece or thereabouts. For a century or so the Courtenay family received a moidore, in addition to the market price, on granting a new lease of any copyhold in Moreton Manor; thus, on 27 October 1739 a new tenant paid £70 “and one moyder of gold.” This manor did not include the whole of Moreton: there were parts of other manors in the parish; and in one of these, “the mannour or lordship of Moretonhampstead and North Bovie,” the custom was pretty much the same. Richard Knight, the lord of the manor, granted a new lease there on 30 September 1689 for £28 “and a broad peece of gould,” and another on 1 June 1693 for £12 “and a gennye of gould.”
My father told me that one day in Exeter he was walking along a street in which a trench was being dug for laying pipes, and a coin of Constantine rolled out from a shovelful of earth that was thrown up as he passed: he gave the workmen sixpence and took the Roman coin. One of his notebooks gives the date, 6 December 1836; and for several years before then Roman coins were dug up almost every day, as gas and water mains were being laid and there was much rebuilding.
In digging for foundations on Bell Hill--the part of South Street between the turnings into Guinea Street and Bear Street--the workmen came upon some tesselated pavement, broken bits of Samian ware, and part of a sistrum of Egyptian green-glazed porcelain. That was in 1833, and the sistrum is now in Exeter Museum. It has the usual head of Hathor (or Isis) on each side, and below that a column of hieroglyphic, reading “neter nefer, neb taui, ...” on one side, and “nesu-bat (Ra ...)” on the other. The lower part was not found. Many Egyptian kings had cartouches beginning with ‘Ra’; but the glazing of the sistrum shows that it was made for one of the kings of Dynasty XXVI somewhere about 600 B.C.