Conder token
Because the government made little effort to ameliorate this shortage, private business owners and merchants took matters into their own hands, and the first tokens of this type were issued in 1787 to pay workers at the Mine Company.
Collecting Conder tokens has been popular since shortly after they were first manufactured, resulting in the availability today of many highly preserved examples for collectors.
[4] The shortage of small denomination coinage reached a critical mass with the move of many workers away from agricultural jobs and into the work force in factories during the Industrial Revolution.
[10] In February 1787 Williams oversaw the minting of the first of many privately issued copper tokens, some being used to pay workers at the Parys Mine Company.
[13] These first tokens bore the image of a hooded Druid, and within two months time were receiving attention in London as a possible solution to the shortage of small denomination coin.
[14] Not long after the appearance of the Druid tokens, other cities, businesses, and proprietors would follow suit and begin designing and minting their own small denomination coinage.
[15] The demand for small denomination coin flourished, and with it the popularity of copper tokens that approximated the size of the halfpenny grew rapidly.
[16] Boulton was no stranger to the manufacture of small metal items, having grown up with and managed his family business for many years, which specialized in buckles.
In the mid-1780s Boulton had turned his attention to coinage; in his eyes coins and tokens were just another small metal product like those he had manufactured for years.
[10] Boulton spent much time in London lobbying for a contract to strike British coins, but in June 1790 the William Pitt Government postponed a decision on recoinage indefinitely.
[21] The national financial crisis reached a point of despair in February 1797, when the Bank of England stopped redeeming its bills for gold.
[20] According to a proclamation dated 26 July 1797, King George III was "graciously pleased to give directions that measures might be taken for an immediate supply of such copper coinage as might be best adapted to the payment of the laborious poor in the present exigency".
However, manufacturers soon found that issuing token designs in very limited mintage meant they could be sold directly to collectors at tidy profits.
[3][33] Each token is identified based on one of four large geographic regions (England, Anglesey and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland), then further by county.
[3][35] England Anglesey & Wales Scotland Ireland When originally published, Dalton and Hamer assigned rarity information to each token based on the number minted with each die pairing, and with each edge type.
