Featured Spoons! Help with AN.NA. stags head hallmark please

Having learned a couple of things from @MrNate (thankyou!) I looked through a canteen of 70’s stainless Oneida cutlery and found these two.
Both c8” long.
One I think I have identified. It has the crowned leopards head for pre 1820 and a slightly squished mark that I think is Elizabeth Toovey 1767-1768. Unfortunately the date letter is too worn to read but 1768 looks the most likely as there is a ghost of a circle left which fits with the Omega symbol. Initals on the underside of the handle.
The other I have completely failed on,I really have tried but have come up with nothing!
I don’t even know if it is silver (tests as such) or silver plate. Non magnetic.
Reads AN.NA. and a stags head over an F. Any clues or help please
Both more silver colour than the lighting suggests.
Thankyou very much.

Think I have identified this one.

The ghost of an omega date letter at the top?


This one I’m really stuck on!

 

Hi

Your spoon is from Malta, the maker is Andrea Naudi, active from the early 1800s.

 

I found AN.NA. in a square with two other marks— a hand in a shield and the letter M in a shield in Seymour B Wyler’s Book of Old Silver, ascribed to Belfast in 1780 or so, and to an unknown smith.

Red’s info is obviously correct. All of the above are Malta marks. I remembered seeing the mark somewhere before, but didn’t think of Malta.

 

Ah, that’s fantastic @Red6 ! Really appreciate the information. I would never have found that. Thankyou

Thankyou very much for looking, that’s interesting I wonder what the Belfast link was

 

Found the link to Belfast!
http://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/psas/article/download/8778/8746/

 

A wild guess, something to do with Knights Hospitaller? Or an item with Malta marks was simply found in Ireland and it looked like it might be provincial Irish silver?

Sorry, can’t open your link.

 

Hmm, sorry, another question, If the F represents a silver fineness of 11.5 deniers how does that relate to modern silver fineness? I thought that would be easy to research but I thought wrong

 

In short, someone made a mistake

 

Hope this helps someone else on this quest for the Maltese marks!

 

Ok, took some googling and a calculator, but the 11.5 deniers means 11.5/12 silver i.e. about 950/1000 silver — i.e. the French purity standard . 11/12 means 916 silver and 10.5 is equal to 875.

 

Your googling is better than mine! Thankyou @Finnclouds
So similar fineness to Britannia silver, just a bit more than sterling. Interestingly it’s significantly heavier than the other one even though it’s a very similar size.

 

11.5 deniers is .959 millessimal fineness.

The same page you got the other Maltese marks info from, a bit further down the page.

https://www.silvercollection.it/DICTIONARYEUHALLMARKMALTA.HTML

 

Correct. I was calculating from 11/12 and not bothering about the third decimal since they called it the French standard. Didn’t notice the deniers on the silvercollection.it site, either. But all the googling wasn’t wasted anyway, since I wanted to understand what the denier system was.

Deniers, to me, evoked pantyhose/tights or dinars in various countries. And my math skills are as rusty as everything else, so I bet that figuring it out from 11.5 equals .959 would’ve taken me a lot longer.

 

P.S. I was first wondering if deniers were like the lots or loths (löthige) used in German speaking countries, i.e. 1/16th parts.

That led to another interesting discovery — which actually doesn’t really matter re silver purity— but the actual weight of the loth varied from 14 grams to 18 grams in different German countries.

Thank goodness for the French revolution and the metric system! Otherwise one might think a 13 loth candlestick might be much higher grade silver than a 11.5. denier one.

 

You are WAY down the rabbit hole @Finnclouds

 

Naah, just procrastinating… have a project I should start. Any excuse…
I promise this won’t last long.

 

Fun to read this thread... and informative. I'm doing the same.

 

Lovely lovely spoons! I love the sneaky marks so much! I’m thrilled you found treasure