Crude CONSTANTINOPOLIS, Constantinople facing left / Constantinopolis standing on a prow of a ship, holding a long scepter and a shield, PLG¢ below. 16mm, 2.00 grams. Imitating Lyons (Lugdunum) mint, but struck in Britain, ca.336-348 AD

Rare mintmark. The crudeness of the insription and the unorthodox bust style gives away the unofficial nature of this piece.

There were a few series of fascinating high quality imitations of VRBS ROMA, CONSTANTINOPOLIS and GLORIA EXERCITVS bronzes produced in Britain in the later 330's-340's AD. The coins were of unusually high quality for British imitations - these were, by far, the nicest of the Romano-British Constantinian barbarics. They might have been semi-official coins, struck because of the acute coin shortage by the local government. All these imitative coins bore mintmarks of Lyons, Trier and (to a lesser extent) Rome, but there produced somewhere in Southern Britain. Dr.Adrian Marsden, in his excellent article about these coins published some 2 decades ago, identified the possible production sites for these coins. I think they were minted in Nether Compton, outside of the Roman Dorchester and perhaps at other locations.