357 years ago, The Royal Mint struck a one pound or 20-shilling Gold coin. It would go on to be known as the Guinea, named after the West Africa country where the coins gold content originated from

In its day the Guinea would not have been used by everybody, due to its high value, and it was said that while a tradesman may be paid in pounds, a gentleman should be paid in Guineas - it was only the great and the good of the British Empire that would have dealt with these coins!

The Guinea garnered respect, circulating widely both at home and abroad and its elegant reputation endures to this day, through its place in literature. Prized in the novels of Austin, Dickens and Eliot, praised in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Robert Burns, and even paid to that literary detective, Hercule Poirot, whose fee, wrote Agatha Christie in Evil under the Sun, was a princely 100 Guineas.

And still today the gold Guinea is prized by collectors, partly due to the fact that they should have all been melted down in the Great Re-Coinage of 1816 to make way for the Sovereign.