by Bill Jackman
The reason for this was partly because late thirteenth-century coins, known as ‘pollards and crockards’, were being imported to purchase English gold and silverwork. The English silver would then be exported to Flanders where the English silver would be exchanged for double the base rate of coins. The foreigners were buying English silver and gold with coinage that was not silver or gold. To curb this malpractice which was affecting the English economy, new and stricter measures were introduced. When Edward I was approached by the Guild of Goldsmiths and asked that something be done to standardise products made of gold and silver in England, he passed a law called Statutum de Moneta, forbidding the importing of foreign coins.
The barons and bailiffs of the port of Winchelsea were ordered in 1278 to search everyone passing through that port, with no exceptions including foreigners, to ensure that they were not carrying any silver plate, clipped coins, or any silver, and that any forbidden good should be confiscated until such time as the offender had answered to the King as to why they were carrying them. It was also a command of the King that no person was to leave the country with any part of silver or gold plate without the King’s special licence.
There were many examples of persons disregarding these laws, despite warnings and punishments. It became such a problem that the King commanded that these laws about taking all manner of gold and silver plate, clipped money, or scrap silver in and out of the country be read out by the bailiffs every fifteen days at every port in England. Only the King could give permission for a piece of silver to leave this country. Only he could issue a special licence to allow anyone to take a piece of silver. The Constable of Dover Castle was given the responsibility to see that this law was carried out. Failure to comply could result in a person’s death and forfeiture of the wrongdoer’s wealth and chattels.
This was not the end of the matter because a later order required that all monies brought into the country be tested at the nearest assayer’s office for view and proof. Unfortunately this did not stop the trafficking in illegal gold and silver because it was treated as contraband and hidden away from the prying eyes of the bailiffs, though many were caught and executed.
The law forbidding the taking of silver from the country was read out at English ports every two weeks to warn people not to do it. One couldn’t travel to another country and take silver coinage with them without written permission, yet the licence to be able to do so was very hard to obtain. In 1306 when the Archbishop of Canterbury wanted to leave England he was not permitted to take any volume of coinage with him.
The King passed a law in 1300 that all pieces of gold and silver would be struck with the leopard’s head to show that it had been assayed, and met the standards of the wardens who controlled the quality of gold and silver ingots. This meant that now the goldsmiths of the realm could be watched more closely to ensure they were only using stock which bore the leopard’s head. This was the start of what we know today as the hallmark.
2 Hallmarks on Silver Toys
It was not until Charles II came to the throne that English coinage ceased being handmade. Until then, all pieces of coinage were stamped with a hammer and clipped to shape with shears. This was most unsatisfactory as there was no regulation size or weight for each coin manufactured and it became an easy way for anyone who felt inclined to make their own money by clipping a bit off each silver coin. When they thought they had sufficient they would then take it along to the silversmith, who would be willing to pay a good sum for the clippings. Alternatively the clippings could be handed over to a forger who would melt them down and, with a forged set of stamps and die, make their own money.
Silver was in very short supply after the English Civil War, the demand for money was so high that it was more profitable to take one’s silver clippings along to a silversmith who would be delighted to pay the value of a coin and sometimes even more. The penalty if one was caught was very severe and usually resulted in branding with a hot iron or being hanged on Holborn Hill where many a criminal finished up.
The Tower of London became the Mint
Horse-driven machines were used to produce perfectly round coins of standard thickness. And an inscription marked around the coins circumference of each coin ensured that there was no chance of clipping the coin without damaging it.
It was unfortunate that the old-style clipped coins were in circulation at the same time as the new ones. This also meant that there was nearly twice the coinage on the streets as was wanted by the Mint. The public didn’t want to part with their old clipped type coins, and they hid them away and didn’t use any of the new coins that came their way.
4 May 1697 was declared the last day for clipped coins to be handed in. The Treasury, which was then in Whitehall, was the collection point, and ten furnaces were set up to melt the out of date coinage. It was melted down into silver ingots. This collecting and melting down lasted several weeks but it was found that the true value of silver received once melted down was far below the expected value because the silver had been mixed with more than the authorised amount of copper for sterling silver.
The public weren’t interested in the new coins and continued clipping pieces from the old currency. They hoarded the new coins; it was far more lucrative to pay for goods with the old coins, and save the new ones. As a result, clipping continued for a long time until all the old coins had been gathered in and melted down.
It was recorded that at one stage £52,000 worth of coinage had been collected in, but once it had been melted down it was only worth half of its proper silver value. People hung on to their old coins until the last day of collection and as a consequence large crowds would gather, trying to ensure their coins made the deadline. New problems arose because the issue of new coins was a very slow process and people who had handed in coins had to wait a long time before they received the new ones. This resulted in a shortage of money everywhere which affected everyone regardless of whether they were rich or poor, and the value of silver continued to rise. As they had no money to spend they had to live on credit – if they could get it.
The standard of silverware had existed from ad 1300 to 1696. However after the Civil War an Act of Parliament was passed which raised the grade of silver on 25 March 1697 to a higher level. This new grade was to be used from that date and all pieces of silver plate had to be stamped with the figure of Britannia. Because of a shortage of silver plate after the Civil War, the goldsmiths started using the silver coins of the realm to make vessels of silver, thus depleting the country’s coinage. Parliament was petitioned to stop this misuse of silver coins. This act made the standard for items made in silver plate higher than that of the coinage. This increase in purity for Britannia silver was raised from 92.5 to 95.84 and stayed that way until rescinded in 1720.
The stamp of Britannia replaced the lion passant, which until then was the mark of sterling silver. Another mark was used with Britannia, which was the ‘lion’s head erased’ (meaning that the lion’s head had been cut off) and which replaced the leopard’s head. This meant the goldsmiths had to use the Britannia silver and stop using the old coinage as their source of silver.
There were other changes to the assay marks. One was the introduction of the year letters, a year earlier than normal. (The year mark was another mark added to the assay marks on silver and it showed the year in which the product was made. This was alphabetical, each letter showing a different year, and each year the style of lettering also changed.) The other was the new maker’s mark, which had to be the first two letters of their surname, not their initial as it had been up until then.
The hallmarking of early Georgian silver toys bears the marks of the initials of the toymaker. Some examples of those marks are:
1665
FC 1609
CK with a mitre above 1686
WP 1689
In the mid eighteenth century the toymakers were producing toys in Britannia silver, which was a higher grade plate. Their names and dates include:
Jacob Margas, 1708
James Godwin, 1710
James Morson, 1720
There were at least another ten toysmiths who continued making toys.
Mathew Boulton (1728–1809) produced fine-quality toys from his workshop in Soho Birmingham, and anyone who is fortunate enough to find or own one is indeed a lucky person.
Mathew was in partnership with another very skilled toymaker named John Fothergill. The toys were stamped MB IF in two separate shields whilst both were active. When the partnership broke up in 1782 only the initial MB was used.
According to Birmingham Assay Office there are no registered toymakers in Birmingham today. They did, however, become established in Birmingham between the years 1770–1780. By now many machines had taken over a lot of the hard work in silversmithing of toys. The toymen could now buy and assemble press-shaped units, which they combined together with handmade parts.
Sterling silver came back into circulation in 1720 and Britannia silver continued along with it for ten years. It was then phased out until it was revived for a short while in late Victorian times. The leopard’s head replaced the lion’s head erased in 1975.
Outside London, the provinces were given the right to have an assay office and stamp their own silver, providing they were producing coins of the realm. Before 1697 many centres used marks. The maker’s mark became very prominent, sometimes being stamped on a piece more than once. Date letters were also found stamped by some cities including York.
The Britannia standard of silver was introduced in 1697, although it is unfortunate that no provision was made for its use in the provinces; technically it was illegal for the provinces to mark silver. However they did, and in doing so added greater confusion because they altered the shape and design of the characters they were then using, making them very awkward to recognise even today.
A new Act was passed by Parliament which allowed any city which had a mint to assay stamp their own silver. The Act, dated 1701, allowed Chester, Bristol, Exeter, Norwich and York to stamp silver.
The Act was a very bad mistake because it not only included Bristol and Norwich, which did not have a mint, but excluded from the list Newcastle which was one of the most important cities and one which had its own mint.
Because of these mistakes, particularly in the omission of Newcastle, a new Act was passed in 1702. From that period onwards all towns and cities that required items of silver marked had to send them to their nearest assay office. By 1883 all the provincial towns had stopped using the leopard’s head. Only London continued to use it to show that was where an item had originated. It was, and is today, the lion passant which is the recognised sign of sterling silver.
It is interesting to note that the leopard’s head was stamped on bars of gold as well as silver and was not confined to London but was used throughout the country. Despite the laws regarding the leopard’s head, unscrupulous goldsmiths continued to try and cheat the system by stamping their own leopard’s head marks on substandard pieces of silver.
The origin of hallmarks
A law was passed in 1363 that every master goldsmith had to have his own mark which he would leave on any piece he had made so that, in the event of dispute, the man responsible could be traced. The marks were registered and were usually small symbols which were personal to that particular goldsmith. It wasn’t until the late fifteenth century that the goldsmith’s personal initials were used instead of a symbol. This made his work much easier to recognise.
In 1478 another letter was added which was known as the date stamp, although it was never originally intended to be such, but a means of tracing the assay master should a piece be found to be substandard. As the assay master was changed each May, a new letter was allocated to each one in succession. It is therefore easy to see how the particular letter could be found and matched to a corresponding year. That is how today we are able to trace the year the item was made (unless the hallmark on the silver was a forgery).
3 Dutch Dating Codes for Silver Items, 1815–1960
Before this practical system of date-stamping silver was introduced, most towns and cities making toys, such as Amsterdam and The Hague, used their own system of date-stamping their or otherwise marking their work. Date marking with a letter started as early as 1503. For a number of centuries there was no national standardised system, each town guild had its own mark and dating system. The present system was put into place in 1815 and has remained largely unchanged until today (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 Dutch date stamping system, 1815–1960.
However, a problem arises when toys are found which, though date-stamped, do not register on this chart: because alphabetical codes were used in the eighteenth century there is no record to establish the exact year in which a particular toy was made.
Figure 3 Alphabetical hallmarks.
The hallmarks in Figure 3 are ordered alphabetically. The section marked A (left-hand column) shows the silver guild marks used in some 35 of the larger towns in the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They show what one would rarely find in reality, namely all four of the marks, supposed to be on a piece of silver during the period prior to the dismantling of the guilds in 1810. Top to bottom they show:
Z for date letter mark for 1782
the Rotterdam silver mark
Next the lion rampant silver guarantee mark (875)[1] the maker’s mark of Vendrik Vrijman.
The B marks, across the top of Figure 3, have been used from 1814 to the present day. From the left they show:
the maker’s mark
lion passant mark
the Minerva head or duty mark
the date stamp mark.
The C (right-hand column)marks are basically the same as B, except that the maker’s mark is unknown. The lion rampant is silver purity .934. The letter L in a circle is the year date for 1921.
D and E: These sword marks were in use 1814–1905 on toys that were too small to take a full hallmarking. They were also used to mark the excess pieces on fully hallmarked objects which comprised of multiple parts.
F This sword mark was in use 1906–1953, in the same circumstances as D and E. From 1953 a similar sword was used, but with the standard silver numerals on the blade of 835[2] and 935.
G is the axe mark, and was in use 1853–1927 as a tax mark for old silver items bearing old silver marks that had come back into circulation.
H and I are tax marks applied to larger articles of foreign silver.
J: The script letter I is also a tax mark for old Dutch made silver. It can be the only letter found on a piece of silver, but does not guarantee anything in particular apart from that of a tax mark.
K: The dolphin mark was in use 1859–1893, for Dutch made articles of silver that were below the 833 purity standard. It was also used in 1893–1905 in a triangular shaped cartouche.
L: The key mark was in use in 1853–1953; it is stamped abutting or intruding on the lion or the sword standard mark to indicate that the object was made for export.
4 The Duty Mark
Silver has for many years been used to collect tax and help governments swell their coffers. This was the case in 1784 when a new tax was imposed on silver and introduced a new mark on silver which was the King’s head, shown in profile. The first king was George III. His head is shown facing to the left, but from 1786 onwards the monarch’s head has always pointed to the right. In 1841 when Queen Victoria came to the throne the sovereign’s profile once more reverted to facing to the left. It stayed this way until 1890 when the stamping of the monarch’s head showing that tax had been paid was discontinued.
The only provincial cities that are assaying outside of London today are Birmingham and Sheffield and they were both established in 1773. Birmingham still uses the anchor as its assay mark and Sheffield the crown. It is said that the two directors of the cities involved were using the Crown and Anchor pub in London as their base whilst waiting for their
petition to be heard in Parliament, and, on the spin of a coin, decided between the two of them who would have the anchor and who would have the crown.
The Hallmarking Act (www.theassayoffice.co.uk)
According to the UK Hallmarking Act of 1973 (amended 1998) it is illegal to offer items for sale described as gold, silver or platinum unless they have been tested and hallmarked by a UK Assay Office. An item may be exempt if it weighs less than 1.00 gm in gold or 7.78 gms in silver. It is also exempt if it weighs less than 0.50 gm in platinum.
Note: There is no weight exemption in the Republic of Ireland, and all items destined for sale there must be hallmarked.
The following information has been offered by Thomas’s UK, 36 Sheep Street, Skipton, UK, Diamonds, Fine Jewellers.
The UK Common Control mark for sterling silver is 925 finesse. Silver has a new commercial standard 800; this means that much jewellery and silverware which has previously been condemned as substandard is now acceptable, although it is not of sterling silver standard. This will bring into recognition European silver in the 800/835 grouping which will be hallmarked 800. It is important to watch out in the use of permitted symbols today. The lion passant (rampant in Scotland) is the mark associated with sterling silver, while 958 Britannia silver had a distinctly different mark. It is in the interest of the collector to be on his guard. On silver after 1999 one must look at the purity as a numeral, because the symbols may be confusing.