British Tokens

The largest copper coin ever issued in Great Britain:

WARWICKSHIRE, Birmingham, Workhouse, Sixpence, 1813, elevation of Workhouse, rev. arms, edge plain, 163.07g/6h (W 375; Davis Warwickshire 727, and pl. Q, no.5, this piece). Minor edge nicks, otherwise very fine and extremely rare; believed about 10 specimens now known, this one arguably the finest available to commerce and sold with a related affidavit as to its 19th century provenance £2,000-£3,000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, 19th Century Tokens from the Collection of the Late Francis Cokayne.

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Provenance: W. Walker Lloyd; T.E. Davies; J. Macmillan; W. Norman Collection, Sotheby Auction, 27-8 June 1905, lot 237.


The affidavit, signed by Emery Davies, reads: “I Thomas Emery Davies of Court Chambers Corporation Street in the City of Birmingham in the County of Warwick make oath and say as follows: The coin I have sold to Mr John Macmillan of Birmingham Commercial Traveller is a Copper Birmingham Workhouse sixpence of the year 1813 and has been in my possession since the year 1867 previous to then it was the property of my first wife who was a Miss Milford and it was given to her by her stepfather Doctor William Walker Lloyd a surgeon who was well known in this Town and in whose possession the Coin had been for many years previous to his presenting the same to my said late Wife”. ‘Sworn at Birmingham in the County of Warwick the 26th day of February 1891. Before me. Jno. Dyson, A Commissioner to administer oaths in the Supreme Court of Judicature in England’

Although referred to in the latest literature as patterns never released for circulation, it seems likely, from the wear on the surviving specimens (of which several have appeared on the market over the years, this being the fourth example auctioned by DNW since 2007), that these coins did enter circulation for a limited time. Weighing five and a half ounces each, they owe their probable existence to the temporary low price of copper relative to silver at the time (cf. Noble I, lot 1921, note). The last time this token was on the open market, at the second Norman sale in 1905, it brought £17 10s (the equivalent of £2,100 today), easily the top price in that auction