Speaker
Description
Cataloguers sometimes prefer to stick with old, discredited, attributions rather than use new ones. One reason is that modern classifications tend to get ever more complicated; the French gros tournois series being a case in point. The gros au lis is a relatively scarce type of gros tournois which, it used to be thought, were struck in Bruges between 1298 and 1302. In the 1997 publication, The Gros Tournois this attribution was shown to be untenable on both coin and written evidence. This has generally been totally ignored. The problem is that it is still not clear where the type does belong. Consequently all of the specimens in the Grierson collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum are still in the Flanders cabinet. In MEC the proposed solution is to move them all to France, but is this too drastic given the uncertainty over the issue?
