French Revolution 5 Sols - Silver

One of the great rarities of the series of 5 Sols struck for the Monneron Brothers. Matthew Boulton and James Watt used the world's first industrial process steam driven coin press to manufacture these. Until I write a monograph on these please see the available links below. I may now have a good representative collection of the 5 Sol types in this series. I never thought I'd find an affordable silver type, they are extremely rare and the one I have seen was in excellent shape and cost many thousands at auction. So, I have this damaged one that was actually holed and plugged at two places, you take what you can get. I'll let the other listings describe further details. [New Note: I have located an affordable silver plated (perhaps solid??) which you can see here at this: [ link ] . As described and illustrated in Reynaud, this beat up example here is a coin that was silver plated somewhere other than Soho. The nice one (EF) has a much thicker silver plating and actually need to be evaluated further to eliminated the possibility of the other example being solid silver, which is considerably rarer.
KM & Mazzard both indicate the silver type and KM omits the gold. I believe both are gilt (plated) but there's a good chance that Boulton made presentation or advertising pieces in solid silver, not his usual metal. In any case I know for sure Boulton made presentation gilt gold of many of his coins from the earliest time. The silver requires more research. The series presents itself in varying weights, this one weighs 26.90 grams at 40 mm.

I did a sampling survey of all the 5 Soles appearing in the records of ACSearch data archives. I examined 289 examples. Only 4 had Roman numeral dates. There were 3 examples in silver, one was clearly a plated silver type; there were 2 gilt (gold) plated examples. I did a similar survey for the top 3 or 4 French coin dealers, but w/o an number sampling, - none had a Roman numeral type I.

VIEW & DOWNLOAD:
Here is the link to the BEST article on Matthew Boulton, the Industrialization of Coinage, and the Monneron Brother's wonderful token coinage during the French Revolution:
Boulton and the Monnerons - Margolis: /library/Boulton%20and%20the%20Monnerons%20-%20Margolis.pdf