I am trying to develop a chart of the weights of various values of English coins for a personal research project, but the values and information I am finding contradict each other, and I’m not sure if it’s because the sources are wrong or my math is.

Source 1 states: - A silver Penny composes of 1.5oz silver - Gold is approximately twice as dense as silver - The silver-to-gold value conversion ratio for the time is approximately 10:1.

I already know that a pound sterling is composed of 240 pence, which would be 360g of silver (1.5 x 240). At a 10:1 conversion, that would put 36g of gold in a pound sterling.

However, source 2 states a gold sovereign of the same time (which had a value of 1 pound sterling) weighed 15.55g. A little under half the gold that should be there according to the 10:1 conversion from silver.

Now the conversion didn’t take the density difference into account, which since gold is double the density of silver would bring the 36g to 18g, much closer to 15.5g. But that would only work out if the 10:1 is by volume, not by weight or mass, and I haven’t seen any indication that is the case.

Does anyone have any insight into this?