In a previous post I reported on a research visit to the Corinium Museum, Cirencester, which was generously facilitated by a small grant from the UK Numismatic Trust. Funding from the UKNT has also allowed me to pursue other research visits to regional archives and museums, and on this basis I visited Tenbury Museum in July 2017 to examine their token collection.

Situated in the northwest of the county on the Shropshire border, Tenbury is probably the smallest of Worcestershire’s ‘small towns’, with just under 3000 inhabitants at the time of the 2001 census – roughly three times the population of the seventeenth century parish, if the evidence of the hearth tax returns of 1664/5 and 1676 ecclesiastical census can be trusted. It lies in the heart of the picturesque Teme Valley, whose undulating topography is a mosaic of rich red cultivated soils, hilly pasture flocked by cattle and sheep, and stretches of ancient woodland interspersed with scattered farmsteads and small villages. Much of this setting was familiar to early modern visitors; according to the late sixteenth century antiquary William Camden, the region possessed ‘rich meadows, and the soil on both sides [of the Teme] produceth excellent Syder, and Hops in great abundance’, while two centuries later the topographer James Baker would note Tenbury’s ‘rich and spacious’ countryside, and how ‘in summer…none exhibits on its bounds larger or more varied successions of productive plantations of grain, cyder-fruit and hops’.  A walk through the town takes barely any time, and gives some stunning glimpses of its medieval and early modern inheritance.

Since 1977 Tenbury has had its own local museum, run by an active and enthusiastic team of volunteers from the Tenbury Wells Museum and History Group. After a speculative enquiry in the spring I quickly discovered that the museum held a small collection of seventeenth century tokens, and after some email correspondence with the group secretary, Mike Thompson, a research visit was arranged for the summer.

On arrival in Tenbury I met up with Mike, who kindly showed me around the stunning Tenbury Pump Rooms, a Grade II* listed mid-nineteenth century bath house built to promote the town as a Victorian working class spa destination. The Museum Group organises tours of the Pump Rooms on a monthly basis, and I’d strongly recommend a visit! Following this trip we headed towards the museum, which presently occupies a Free School built in 1819 on the bequest of the Hereford-born coal merchant Edward Goff. The building is attractive, but very small – although this is certainly part of its charm.

The numismatic collection at Tenbury Museum is similarly modest, as is its Worcestershire token element – just three specimens. Size isn’t everything, however,  and from the perspective of the Project these objects represent a very welcome body of evidence indeed. One specimen is a civic halfpenny of the Wardens of Bewdley, issued in 1668 (Cotton 3); its reverse motif, an anchor flanked by a sword and a rose, is the same design as that used on the town’s common seal. The remaining two specimens are both private issues: one a 1667 halfpenny of Thomas Balamey of Kidderminster (Cotton 40), and the other a 1662 halfpenny of William Swift of Worcester (Cotton 107). Balamey’s profession is indicated by the presence of the Weavers arms on the obverse of his token, and extracts from his 1691 probate inventory published by Cotton illuminate the nature of his business: his ‘stock in trade’ included eight looms, large quantities of wool and linen yarn, and other tools of the trade. It also informs us of the standards of living a successful weaver might maintain at this date, which included a well-furnished house and personal estate worth £206 6s. 9d.

Swift’s token, by contrast, chose to depict the three pears of Worcester, leaving few numismatic clues as to his profession. The Swifts were a prominent family in seventeenth century Worcester, with one member,  Samuel Swift, being elected to the mayoralty in 1684; the named William Swift can probably be identified with the 57 year old ‘merchant and sugar baker, grocer and draper’ recorded in the county visitation of 1682-3 , who had previously served as the county’s high sheriff in 1675, and whose burial is recorded in the parish registers of Worcester St Swithun under 20 February 1688.

From a numismatic perspective the specimens in Tenbury Museum have some interesting features. The halfpenny of William Swift, for example, was struck using a pair of dies observed on another specimen that I have recorded; however, the Tenbury specimen lacks a die crack present on that specimen, so must have been produced before it. This sort of information is really useful for building up a high-resolution chronology of token production, so was a real treat to discover! Both other specimens are also struck from dies recorded in other museum collections – in these cases, the phenomenal nineteenth century collection formed by William Alfred Cotton held at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum.

I’m really grateful to Mike Thompson and the team at Tenbury Museum for facilitating this research, and to the UK Numismatic Trust for providing the funding that made it happen.

Murray Andrews

With the kind support of a small grant from the UK Numismatic Trust, in April 2017 I was able to undertake the first of several research visits to study examples of Worcestershire tokens held in regional museums. My destination? The Corinium Museum, Cirencester!

I must admit that this was a quite unexpected location to find myself on the hunt for seventeenth century tokens. Cirencester is best known as the site of Corinium Dobunnorum, the second largest town in Roman Britain; consequently, the Corinium Museum holds an absolutely exquisite collection of Roman material from the town and its hinterland, and rightly emphasises these finds in its public galleries.  However, the museum also holds a decent post-Roman archaeological and numismatic collection, within which is presently included the archaeological collection of Reverend David Royce (1817-1902), a Rutland-born vicar and antiquary formerly based at Lower Swell near Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire. Donated to St Edward’s Hall, Stow-on-the-Wold, in 1902, Royce’s collection primarily consists of local finds acquired during his tenure in the Cotswolds, and preliminary work on this material was initiated by Leslie Grinsell in the mid-twentieth century and eventually published in the Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society in 1964. In this paper Grinsell noted that Royce ‘was for many years an ardent collector of 17th-century trade tokens of the Cotswolds and their surroundings’; for reasons of brevity, however, only the Gloucestershire component of this collection was published, leaving the character of its Worcestershire element frustratingly unclear.  After a few emails and phonecalls I discovered that Royce’s archaeological collection had since been relocated to the Corinium Museum, and now formed the target of my visit; once all was arranged with the museum I hopped on the early train to Kemble to undertake the research.

The Worcestershire element of Royce’s token collection was small, consisting of four tokens only: three of Shipston on Stour, and one of Evesham. This mix seems quite consistent with the suggestion that these represent local finds discovered in the north Cotswolds; Evesham and Shipston are some of the southernmost Worcestershire towns whose denizens are known to have struck tokens during the seventeenth century, and both were connected to the area around Moreton-in-Marsh and Stow-on-the-Wold by major overland routes at this period.

All of the Worcestershire tokens housed in the Royce collection are private issues, produced on behalf of named individuals rather than civic institutions. The Evesham specimen was a 1649 farthing token of Peter Cross (Cotton 31a), and was in very crisp condition; it is quite likely that it had never entered the ground, and could well have been discovered between the floorboards of an old building prior to Royce acquiring it. The same could not be said for one of the Shipston on Stour specimens, a 1666 halfpenny token of Henry Cotterell (Cotton 60); this example is moderately corroded and rather worn, and probably was unearthed by the plough like so many of the other finds in Royce’s collection.

The last two tokens are undated farthing tokens of Edward Pittway (Cotton 62), each a die-duplicate of the other. Establishing the dating of such specimens is one of the main aims of the Worcestershire Token Project, and while a thorough treatment of this topic must await the results of the completed die study, the borders surrounding the inscription and central designs give some clues. Early work on seventeenth century Oxfordshire tokens by John Milne has provided a standard classification for border types, and his research – and subsequent work on other county series by George Berry, Peter Preston-Morley, and George Pegg, among others – has demonstrated that border types have a broad correspondence with issue dates. All the specimens of this type that I’ve seen combine cable pattern inner borders with outer borders composed of ‘oblong labels’, a combination that occurs on tokens of other counties in the period 1648-c.1664.

What about the faces behind the objects? As always, our first clues are stamped across the tokens themselves. Edward Pittway’s tokens bear the Ironmongers Arms, while those of Henry Cotterell bear the Mercers Arms, indicating the trades of their issuers. Peter Cross’ token, however, bears no such information, and we are forced to delve a little deeper into the historical record. The seventeenth century Evesham Borough Books, meticulously edited by Stephen Roberts and published by the Worcestershire Historical Society, confirm that Cross was a man of some local standing. He was elected as assistant to the town council on 30 March 1649, and held that role as late as 1665. Cross died in the summer of 1667, and his burial is recorded in the parish register of Evesham All Saints under 16 July 1667; by the end of the following month he had been replaced in his civic post by one Thomas Bartlett. The design of Cross’ token adopts the common motif of a triangle of initials representing his own name and that of his wife, whose forename is recorded only as the letter ‘M’; consultation of the parish register of Evesham All Saints confirms her maiden name as Mary Baseley, the couple having wed on 7 October 1638. Future research will add much more flesh to these bones!

Many thanks to all the staff at the Corinium Museum, Nigel Surman (Stow and District Civic Society), and the UK Numismatic Trust for generously sharing information, granting access to the Royce collection, and generally making this trip possible!

Murray Andrews