"Princess Anne is most certainly Queen Elizabeth's daughter. Mike may be thinking of Princess Margaret, who was Elizabeth's sister.

I expect a thousand other readers will be telling you this! Thanks for all the good work and best wishes"

"The original was correct. Princess Anne is the Queen's daughter (born 1950), the younger sister of Prince Charles. Your correspondent Mr King may have been thinking of the Queen's sister Princess Margaret in error. The medal was thus from just the one person, who happened to be both the reigning Queen and Anne's mother, as originally stated."

"My apologies, but I was mistaken about Princess Anne. She was the daughter of the current queen."

"That is one of my favorite historic Russian coins. What that coin is, is a coin that was re-struck twice. It started out life as a 5 kopecks, and was re-struck as a "cipher" 10 kopecks dated 1796, in a surreptitious government plan to double some of the government's money. The cipher was a very large cursive Cyrillic E, abbreviation for Ekaterina, for Tsarina Catherine (the Great). The government saved up about 500,000 5-kopeck coins and started to re-coin them as 10-kopeck coins with the new cipher design, striking them with great force to try to spread them out (expanding their diameters; also, thinning them) so they would look like they contained enough metal to be accepted at face value. They were also going to acquire new edges, to further fool the public. The secret work was started at multiple mints. I think the scam was the idea of Catherine's finance minister.

"Anyway, Catherine died in 1796, and her son, Tsar Paul I (who disagreed with everything she did) immediately cancelled the project. All of the newly-re-struck 10-kopeck coins were re-struck as 5-kopeck coins again using old dies, so the government could spend them. Surviving original 1796 cipher 10 kopecks are extremely rare. I think I have 4 of these re-struck coins, and am always on the lookout for a bolder cipher. One of mine has a very bold 1796 date. The cipher is usually pretty faint on these if still visible at all. Part of the central horizontal denomination legend still showing from the 10-kopecks undercoin is usually the giveaway, but a circled ball in a field will do the trick, and is exciting to find. (OK, I'm weird.)

"The coin in the photo shows part of the horizontal denomination legend from the 10-kopeck die (inverted and at a slight angle) just below the bottoms of the eagle's necks. There were other denomination-increasing Russian copper recoinages during the 18th century, too. On those, sometimes you can see traces of both of the undercoins; the original denomination coin, the temporarily-increased denomination strike, and the final re-strike of the original denomination using old dies over that, haphazardly rotated from the original strike."

"In fact, it is theoretically possible that such a coin may have been struck a total of five times! Here is the possible sequence: a 5 Kopeck piece of Elizabeth, restruck as a 10 Kopeck piece in 1762 by Peter III, restruck again as a 5 Kopeck piece by Catherine II ca. 1763-89, restruck a third time as a 10 Kopeck piece of the Cipher design in 1796, and restruck a fourth time as a 5 Kopeck piece of the usual Catherine II design in 1797 by Paul I. (Can you imagine how one of these coins would feel? "Oh, come on! Make up your mind, already!").

"Obviously, this would be difficult to confirm, as traces of earlier overstriking would have been obliterated by later ones, and thus the third way of discerning coins from the 1797 recoining program is by identifying traces of the 1796 Cipher design under the Catherine II 5 Kopeck design. The most telling clue is remnants of the distinctive dots of the Cipher design. Other prominent traces also found are remains of the large script "E", the 1796 date, and the denomination inscription."