Sir Thomas More, the Tudor politician, was also a coin collector. In 1518 he was corresponding with Bude, complimenting him greatly on his renowned numismatic work, De asse et partibus euis (1514).
In 1520 he was a member of the entourage that travelled with King Henry VIII to the continent in order to attend the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is recorded that amongst the belongings that he took with him was his coin collection, a not inconsiderable collection of 200 gold coins and 600 silver. That it was a collection and not just a record of the currency he took with him is evident from an anecdote connected to the trip.
More met with the German humanist Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547), the emperor Maximilian I’s archaeological advisor and perhaps most well known for his association with the Peutinger Table, a medieval copy, c.1200 of a late antique (5th century?) map of the Roman road network.
As part of the meeting More offered Peutinger the opportunity to add any coins from his own collection. Peutinger only accepted one coin and the meeting is recorded as a note in his copy of Polydore Vergil’s Anglicae historiae, libri XXVI (1734). He wrote:
“....... there also then was the ambassador of the English King, Thomas More, who showed me 200 gold and 600 silver coins, and wanted that I should take from them what I wanted. But I saw none, which I did not previously have, except a coin of Carausius, which at my request he gave to me in the presence of the Spanish Juan Luis Vives with the inscription IMP CARAVSIVS PF AVG/FELICITAS AVG HSR/ on the one side his portrait/ on the other a ship with men etc.“
The reported mint mark, HSR, could either be a mis-reading of RSR. There is another possibility and that is that it is a slightly blundered die on this early Carausius coin, for example, SRS is a recorded variant for the mark. Furthermore in a later notebook Peutinger corrects the mint mark reading to RSR.
The Peutinger collection remained intact for about 170 years, getting dispersed after the demise of his last male heir in 1718. Although we do not know where More’s coin is now, and there are also no known engravings of it, Sam Morehead has included in the new RIC V.5, where it is recorded as RIC (2nd ed’n) 90. Peutinger’s description is taken as being robust enough to justify the inclusion.
