How does the legend read, do you think?

[pavka]

Bit of a stupid question but...

Looking at a pre-decimal coin of Queen Elizabeth II with a legend in Latin, it says:

a) ELIZABETH · II · DEI · GRATIA · REGINA · F : D : +
or
b) + ELIZABETH · II · DEI · GRATIA · REGINA · F : D :

Example:
https://onlinecoin.club/Coins/Country/Australia/Halfpenny_1962/

In other words, is the cross the first or the last symbol?

Does anyone know if it has any special meaning?

[Nevol]

I couldn't say for sure but looking at Numista, they have b) on the pre-dec's I looked at.

[nealeffendi]

Bit of a stupid question but...

No such thing as a stupid question. Also :welcome:
By asking "stupid" questions it gets others hopefully thinking about why things are accepted as being the carved in stone facts and then finding the accepted facts are codswallop.

[pavka]

Problem is, if I change it to start with the cross (which seems to be the case...) all alphabetic order of legends will go to hell. There's only about 100 now so no problem, but in future I am planning to expand the list to thousands.

[Hercules]

I've tried using Google, but I'm completely stumped as to what the cross means. I suspect the Brits themselves don't even know, because they would have said so otherwise. Anyway, I think it's either a placeholder denoting the start and end of the legend, or it's a cross representing the Church of England. Take your pick, because your guess is as good as mine! :winkextra:

[pavka]

Its use is also inconsistent... It's not on coins of Fiji, for example, and also not on some UK sovereigns with the Arnold Machin portrait.

[Hercules]

Does anyone know what the colons mean in "F : D :"?

[Nevol]

Just separators I think, indicating that F & D are whole words, short for Defender of the Faith.

[Mister T]

Yeah just separators - sometimes they're dots (either full stops or bullet points) on other obverses for other monarchs.

[Sapyx]

Mediaeval European coins were typically covered in crosses, to indicate the king issuing the coin was a Christian king.

In mediaeval times, the cross at the 12 o'clock position indicated where on an otherwise crude and confusing coinage design the legend was supposed to begin. So in that sense, the cross is at the "beginning" of the legend. But it doesn't really mean anything beyond "start reading here".

As coin legends became more readable over time, the cross position was also sometimes used in late mediaeval and early modern times as the location of a mintmark or "mintmaster's mark", which helped identify which mintmaster was responsible for that particular coin, but this tradition died out in Britain once coins began to be struck bearing actual dates. So the cross on 20th century coinage does not have any mintmark function.

[pavka]

Thank you for the very informative answer Sapyx :-)