Owner Comments:
Date: 1788
Description: Anglesey Mines Company copper halfpenny token, 1788
A Half Penny token coin from the Angelsey Mines in North Wales, these coins were valid money for trade for Welsh Miners in the late 18th century.
The obverse features a shrouded Druid's head. The monogram "PM Co" (Parys Mines Company) is on the reverse. Rim legend: Payable in Anglesey London or Liverpool.
Diameter: 28mm .
Historical Note:
When we speak of British tokens, we are almost always speaking of copper pieces, with a stated or implied value of a penny or less. That this should be the case is partially explained by the attitude of the British government concerning copper as a coinage metal. Throughout the period under discussion, the official view was that copper was not a proper metal for a regal coinage at all, and, by extension, that copper coinage was not an especially important activity for the Royal Mint to pursue. Of course, such an attitude on the part of officialdom does not neccessarily call forth a copper token coinage. But in the case of Britain, it happened to coincide with a basic historical fact: more and more people where leaving the farm for the workshop and, later, the factory. As Britain moved from a predominantly rural, farming situation to an increasingly urban, industrialized one, the traditional methods of payment for labor and products in kind or in services began to break down. And more and more people entered a wage-earning situation. In the absence of low-denomination coins, how would they be paid? Inevitably, the effort to answer this question would call the token into being.
Private and public tokens alike left circulation once the Crown made a determined effort to provide small change for the people. But an implicit threat remained: if more and more people entered the cash economy, and if the Royal Mint once again refused to provide them with copper coinage, then the copper token would reappear. It did so in the 1780's, and the British Isles entered their second phase of private, unofficial coinage.halt in production happened to coincide with the opening phases of the Industrial Revolution, which was bringing ever-increasing numbers of people together in a wage environment. The situation rapidly worsened, and metal fabricators in and around Birmingham, the center of the new industry, finally decided to take matters into their own hands. As the greatest of them, Matthew Boulton of Soho, remarked in 1787,
... for if our Governmt will not make a new copper coinage we shall force them to it by coining for our Selves such copper penys.
The first pieces to appear were pennies, products of the Parys Mine Company, owner of immensely rich copper workings near the town of Amlwch, on the island of Anglesey. By the later 1780's, the mining operation (an open pit affair, conducted by blasting away the ore-rich face of Parys Mountain with gunpowder) was employing well over a thousand men locally, and many more at its rolling operations at Holywell, Flintshire. Early in 1787, the owners of the concern, headed by Thomas Williams of Llanidan, the legendary "Copper King" of industrial folklore, decided to set up their own mint, striking some of their copper into penny pieces for their employees' use.
What happened next is not entirely clear and probably never will be. But there seem to have been two mints, one at Holywell, the other in Birmingham, on the site of the present Great Charles Street. It is conjectured that the penny issues of 1787 were struck in Holywell, those of 1788 in Birmingham; this guesswork is based upon the few clues remaining in Birmingham. But we do not known the precise time of the transfer of operations from one mint to another, nor do we know the precise reasons for the switch. We do know the artist responsible for the issue: he was John Gregory Hancock, Sr., a talented inventor and die-sinker of the day. Hancock would be responsible for a great many of the tokens of this first phase of the eighteenth-century series.
Halfpennies joined the pennies in 1788; they were struck in quantity that year, and in somewhat smaller numbers in 1789. In the latter year, the company appears to have sold its equipment to another, much better known coiner, Matthew Boulton. Later issues were struck for the company by Boulton and several others, in 1790 and 1791. The series was also extensively counterfeited.
Genuine Parys Mine tokens are immediately distinguishable, however. They are lovely, massive pieces, containing close to their intrinsic value in copper. Hancock's sensitive portrait of a Druid adorned the obverse, set within a wreath of oak leaves. The reverse used a cypher representing the company's name as a central type; pennies included a promise of payment as a reverse legend, while the halfpennies indicated that they were products of the Anglesey mines. A carefully lettered edge gave the names of places where the tokens might be redeemed. Many of the pennies were struck in a restraining collar, after their edges had been marked.
All in all, over three hundred tons of these tokens were issued, making them the single most common type of eighteenth-century token.