Some Weymouth Tokens
The Town Token
Thomas Hyde
Bartholomew Beer
James Stanley
James Budd
Few events seem to have occurred during the Protectorate that need recording beyond the great naval victory gained by Blake over Van Tromp, off Portland; and, as some compensation for the damage done to their property during the reign of his father, Charles II. granted the town in 1660 an annuity of £100 a year for ten years from the Customs’ dues. It was during this reign that tradesmen coined small money or tokens for the convenience of those wishing to buy small quantities of goods, as but little small money was coined by authority. In 1594 the Mayor of Bristol was granted permission to coin a token, and the benefit to the community proved so great that the custom spread to other towns. Weymouth coined many of these tokens (see illustration), which were made of copper, brass, or lead, and decorated as fancy dictated. Every person and tradesman in the town was obliged to take them, and they undoubtedly answered the purpose of providing the people with small money. In 1672, however, Charles II. ordered to be coined a sufficient number of half-pence and farthings for the exigencies of the State, and these numorum famuli were prohibited as being an infringement of the King’s prerogative.
The grant of armorial bearings to Weymouth and Melcombe Regis bears the date of May 1st, 1592. The seals of the town were eight in number, a description of which is recorded in Ellis’s History of Weymouth.
When the ill-starred Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis in 1685, no Weymouthians seem to have flocked to his standard. Upon the failure of the rebellion the participants of the neighbourhood were quickly disposed of by Judge Jeffreys, who opened his Bloody Assize at Dorchester, and ordered them to be hanged at Greenhill, and their bodies to be dismembered and exhibited throughout the county as a warning to rebels.
Arms of Weymouth
So we come down to the close of the seventeenth century with little to record save devastating fires, plagues, and storms. A general period of poverty and depression seems then to have overtaken the two towns. The causes leading to this change, which had begun to show itself in the reign of Elizabeth, were many and various, and may be briefly ascribed to the concrete result of the vicious rule of the Stuarts, the removal of the wool trade to Poole, the loss of the Newfoundland trade, and the injury received during the Civil War. Ellis tells us that, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, “scarcely any idea can be formed of the general devastation and depression that everywhere prevailed. Houses were of little value ... the population had dwindled to a mere nothing ... old tenements fell down ... the inhabitants consisted chiefly of smugglers and fishermen.”
Before we turn to the brighter days which set in towards the middle of the reign of George III., a short account must be given of the larger memorials of the town—e.g., the old bridge, the priory, and the parish church, although it must be confessed that of important antiquities dating before the Georgian era the town has little to show beyond a few remnants of Jacobean houses, part of one solitary pillar of the chapel, and possibly a few old doorways; and in later and minor memorials the town is little better off. There is, in the Guildhall, the fine iron-bound chest before mentioned, and another, said to be of similar origin, bequeathed by the late Sir Richard Howard. There is also an ancient chair with a cardinal’s hat carved on the back, and the old stocks and whipping-post; but for the most part nothing has survived save the truly Georgian, such as round windows, picturesque doorways, and part of the old Gloucester Lodge, now an hotel—an altogether disappointing record in comparison with the long and varied history of the place.
Sidney Heath>