1 Angel - Henry VII class IV

Henry VII's class IV Angels belong to a period when the king was systematically overhauling English coinage standards, partly in response to chronic under-weight pieces that had degraded commercial confidence throughout the later fifteenth century. The .995 fineness was not generosity — it was a calculated move to make English gold internationally competitive with Florentine and Burgundian issues circulating in the same merchant networks.

The Angel by this reign had also acquired a formal role in the touching ceremony for scrofula, presented by the monarch to sufferers as a healing piece. Examples that passed through that ritual occasionally show piercing, though class IV pieces found intact command considerably more attention from serious collectors of late medieval English gold.