The silver Three Farthings (¾d) coin was introduced in Queen Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I of England

Elizabeth I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty...

's third and fourth coinages (1561-1582), as part of a plan to produce large quantities of coins of varying denominations and high metal content.

The obverse shows a left-facing bust of the queen, with a rose behind her and the legend E D G ROSA SINE SPINA -- Elizabeth, by the grace of God a rose without a thorn—while the reverse shows the royal arms with the date above the arms and a mint mark

Mint mark

A mint mark is an inscription on a coin indicating the mint where the coin was produced.-History:Mint marks were first developed to locate a problem. If a coin was underweight, or overweight, the mint mark would immediately tell where the coin was minted, and the problem could be located and fixed...

 at the beginning of the legend reading CIVITAS LONDON -- City of London

City of London

The City of London is a small area within Greater London, England. It is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial. The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of...

, the Tower Mint

Royal Mint

The Royal Mint is the body permitted to manufacture, or mint, coins in the United Kingdom. The Mint originated over 1,100 years ago, but since 2009 it operates as Royal Mint Ltd, a company which has an exclusive contract with HM Treasury to supply all coinage for the UK...

.

The three-farthings coin closely resembles the three-halfpence

Three halfpence (British coin)

The British three halfpence was a silver coin worth 1½d or 1/160th of a pound produced for circulation in the British colonies, mainly in Ceylon and the West Indies in each year between 1834 and 1843, and also in 1860 and 1862...

 coin, differing only in the diameter, which is 14 millimetres for an unclipped coin, compared to 16mm for the three-halfpence.

All the coins are hammered

Hammered coinage

Hammered coinage is the most common form of coins produced since the invention of coins in the first millennium BC until the early modern period of ca...

, except for the extremely rare milled

Milled coinage

In numismatics, the term milled coinage is used to describe coins which are produced by some form of machine, rather than by manually hammering coin blanks between two dies or casting coins from dies.-History:The earliest machine known for producing coins is the screw press, invented by Leonardo...

three-farthings of 1563, of which only three examples are known to exist.