1 Penny - Henry III Short Cross type, class 7c

The Short Cross penny series ran from 1180 under Henry II through most of Henry III's reign, with the cross on the reverse deliberately kept short of the coin's edge — a design choice that made clipping harder to detect, since clippers could remove silver from the rim without visibly cutting into the design. Class 7 issues fall within the period when the coinage was deeply problematic: widespread clipping and the circulation of foreign imitations had so degraded the currency that Henry III eventually commissioned a full recoinage in 1247, replacing the Short Cross type entirely with the Long Cross design, whose arms now reached the rim precisely to expose clipping.