1 Silver ECU Sir Walter Raleigh

The Tower Mint issued this piece under a licensing arrangement that allowed private mints to produce legal tender coinage for smaller jurisdictions — in this case almost certainly one of the British Crown dependencies or overseas territories. Raleigh's connection to Elizabethan colonial ambition made him a recurring subject for such issues through the 1990s, when the commemorative ECU market briefly flourished ahead of European monetary union. The ECU itself never circulated as physical coinage; these were struck purely for the collector trade, timed to expire as a concept the moment the euro launched in 1999.