It’s not known exactly how many coins like this are in existence. However, the practice of pressing the suffragettes’ message into currency would have taken time and effort, so it’s presumed that very few were made – and moreover, that they were made by just one person, in secret.

Around the same time this coin is thought to have been stamped, Emily Wilding Davison threw herself in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby, brandishing a suffragette flag in her desperate fight for the vote. Compared with a protest like that, an emblazoned coin might seem like a rather small act of rebellion.

But in fact, stamping coins was a direct attempt to subvert the power of the monarch and an act that would have been punishable by law. Even today, defacing currency remains a crime in the Currency and Bank Notes Act of 1928 and defacing the head of the monarch could theoretically see the perpetrator handed a hefty fine.

The marking of this coin with a political message, says Hockenhull, is a “deliberate targeting of the king, as the constitutional monarch and head of the Church of England, that could be likened to iconoclasm, a direct assault on the male authority figures that were perceived to be upholding the laws of the country.”

Watch the video below to go behind the scenes at the British Museum and learn more about this unique piece of history.

Why did the suffragettes carve protest messages into coins?