One of the greatest rarities of British coinage, an 1819 George III gold sovereign sold by the U.K.’s Royal Mint through a ballot – with the winning collector acquiring it for £100,000 (about $170,000 Cdn.) – was recently certified as Fine-12.
The coin was submitted by the mint to a London, England-based affiliate of the third-party grading service Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC). It’s only the second 1819 sovereign, less than 4,000 of which were minted, to be certified by NGC.
The coins were minted for private merchants using gold they provided, and by 1829, they had virtually vanished from circulation.
Today, 200 years after they were struck, fewer than 10 examples are believed to exist, and they’re considered the most elusive in the entire sovereign series.
“We were thrilled to present this sovereign to the public on the 200th anniversary of the year it was struck,” added Matt Curtis, head of historic coins at the Royal Mint.