Countermarked coins used in England
In the late eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries there was a chronic shortage of British coins. Using Scotland as an example, Adam Smith estimated that the total circulating coins in 1707 was just over one million pounds sterling in value. By 1776, the year of the publication of The Wealth of Nations, his calculations suggested that the gold and silver coin incirculation - in a greatly expanded Scottish economy - might only account for some half a million pounds. The principal reason was that the market price for silver was higher than the Royal Mint was authorised to pay.
Britain needed more silver coin and the answer to this problem lay in the vast number of foreign coins, mostly eight reales, which captured in war or acquired through peaceful commerce, filled the vaults of the Bank of England and were available as a regular commocity on the bullion market. In 1797 Spanish dollars were stamped, by authority of the Bank of England, with the oval punch containing the bust of George III which was used to mark silverware.
A number of private companies also countermarked dollars aith their own marks which recycled the foreign coins as British tokens. Harrington Manville's Tokens of the Industrial Revolution Foreign Silver Coins Countermarked for use in Great Britain, c. 1787-1828, gives an historical account of the cities, towns and hamlets which became the places for issuing such countermarked coins, following that with detailed comments on the issuers, and a catalogue of recorded examples.
When the great silver shortage ended, almost all of the countermarked coins were exchanged for official coin, and melted.
Cark Cotton Mill, Cartmel, Lancashire
KM-; Manville101 4/6 on 8r 1777 Mo FM
Thackery, Stockdale & Co, a partnership between James Stockdale (1724-1806), an entrepreneur who lived at Cark House, Joseph Thackery and Joseph Ryder, Manchester cotton merchants, Thomas Satterthwaite, a West Indian merchant from Lancaster, and Edward Hardy (died1796), an engineer from Mossley, operated the Cark cotton mill. One of James Watt’s first steam-engines was installed at Cark in 1786, which was in full production by 1787.
Cromford, Derbyshire
KM-643; Manville 104 4/9 on 8r 1778 Mo FF
KM-643; Manville 102 5/ (over 4/9) on 8r 1798 Mo FM
Richard Arkwright was one of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, making huge improvements in methods of spinning cotton. He opened a horse-powered spinning mill in Nottingham in 1775 and a few years later a larger water-powered mill at Cromford, utilising the waters of the river Derwent. His son, also Richard, took over the running of Cromford and other mills in 1792 and his concern for the health and welfare of his workers resulted in numerous innovations, including the provision of circulating coinage.
Donald & Co., Birmingham, Warwickshire
KM-C645; Manville 100 5/ on 8r 1804 Mo TH
These coins were probably issued by one William Donald, a hosier and clothing and hat manufacturer, listed in the Birmingham trade directories at various addresses between c. 1793 and 1815.
Revolution Mill, East Retford, Nottinghamshire
KM ; Manville 105 crowned ampersand on 8r 1777 Mo FM
The issuer was John Cartwright (1740-1824), proprietor of the Revolution Mill, built on the north side of Spital Hill, Retford, and opened in 1788. The mill was in disuse by the turn of the 19th century and after the building was sold in 1805, Cartwright moved to London.
The lack of an issuer’s name and a denomination place this countermark early in the countermarking period, before marks began to show more details. In fact the mark might never have been connected with the Revolution Mill had it not been for a notation by Sarah Sophia Banks in her acquisitions notebook... that she had received one in 1794Manville. op. cit., p.210.