Chats on Old Silver

by Arthur Hayden

4. Assayed at Newcastle from 1702 to 1720.

5. Assayed at any of the assay offices (except Dublin; no Higher Standard silver being made in Ireland) after 1720 to the present day. Although such silver plate of the Higher Standard has not since been compulsory by law since 1720.

The Britannia period is an intricate period in the study of silver plate, but the history underlying the Acts which governed the hall-marking at this period should appeal to the collector who wishes to endow his plate with historic interest. Without digressing too widely into economic questions which threatened to paralyse commerce and to destroy the allegiance to William III, it is of essential interest to the collector of old silver plate to realize the conditions which rendered the Higher Standard Mark of the Britannia and the lion’s head erased necessary to prevent financial disasters of considerable magnitude. The plate closet provides the historian with many of his facts. It was in the days of Charles I that the loyalists melted down their plate to be converted into coin of the realm. It was in William’s day that clippers of coins provided silver for the silversmith to fashion into his pleasing shapes. At what cost will be shown.

Till the reign of Charles II our coin had been struck by a process as old as the thirteenth century. The metal was shaped with shears and stamped by the hammer. The inexactitude of such coinage became the opportunity for the clipper of coins. A mill was set up at the Tower of London which was worked by horses and superseded the human hand. The coins were exactly circular, their edges were inscribed with a legend, and clipping was thereby made apparently impossible. But the hammered coins and the milled coins were current together. The result was, as it always is, that the light and poorer coin drove the better one out of the current circulation. The milled crown new from the mint became more valuable for shipment abroad or for use in the crucible.

Coiners grew and multiplied because the damaged and defaced coins could be more easily imitated. Hundreds of wretched persons were dragged up Holborn Hill, and in spite of flogging, branding, and hanging, the trade of the coin clipper was easier than highway robbery, and as fortunes were to be made those who followed that avocation took the risks, as did smugglers. It was a dangerous occupation. Seven men were hanged one morning and a woman branded, but this did not deter the hundreds who were undetected. One clipper who was caught offered £6,000 for a pardon, which was rejected, but the news gave a stimulus to the industry. The Government of the day became alarmed at the state of things, which grew from bad to worse. A sum of £57,200 of hammered money paid into the Exchequer was tested by the officials. It should have weighed above 220,000 ounces; it weighed under 114,000 ounces. (Lowndes’ Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins, 1695.) A Quaker who came from the North journeyed southwards, and his diary shows that as he travelled towards London the innkeepers were astonished at the full and heavy weight of the half-crowns he offered. They asked where such money could be found. The guinea which he purchased at Lancaster for twenty-two shillings bore a different value at every stage. In London it was worth thirty shillings, and would have been worth more had not the Government fixed this as the highest at which gold should be received in payment of taxes. The Memoirs of this Quaker were published in the Manchester Guardian some thirty years ago.

It may readily be imagined that such a state of things began to cripple trade. Merchants stipulated as to the quality of the coin in which they were to be paid. “The labourer found that the bit of metal which, when he received it, was called a shilling, would hardly, when he wanted to purchase a pot of beer or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as sixpence.” Tonson the bookseller sends Dryden forty brass shillings. Another time he paid the poet in silver pieces that were so bad that they could not be passed.

The Government still believed in penalties, and hoped that drastic punishment would stop the clipping of the hammered coin and the melting and export of the new milled coin. A clipper who informed against two other clippers was pardoned. Any one informing against a clipper had a reward of forty pounds. Whoever was found in the possession of silver clippings, filings, or parings should be burned in the cheek with a red-hot iron. Officers were empowered to search for bullion, and the onus of proof as to its origin was thrown on the possessors, or failing this they were fined heavily. But all in vain were these drastic measures; clipping still continued in defiance of all penal laws. Colley Cibber in his Love’s Last Shift, or the Fool in Fashion, has a hit at the debased state of the coinage. A gay cynic says, “Virtue is as much debased as our money: and, in faith, Dei Gratia is as hard to be found in a girl of sixteen as round the brim of an old shilling.”

This is not the place to enumerate the many foolish schemes that were propounded, some too costly, some unjust, some hazardous.