1/2 Crown - Charles I Tower mint, under Parliament

After Parliament seized the Tower of London in 1642, it continued striking coinage in Charles I's name — a pragmatic fiction that kept commerce moving while the Civil War bled on. The mint's output during these years served a government actively fighting its king, yet bore his image without apparent irony. Royalist mints at Oxford, Bristol, and Shrewsbury were simultaneously doing the same, producing competing issues of nominally identical authority.

Spink 2778 covers a span of dies across the 1643–1646 window, and individual pieces can often be attributed more narrowly by mintmark sequence — the sun, sceptre, and eye marks each corresponding to specific years within that range.