A Brighton token with the Storming of the Bastille
Thomas Spence (1750-1814)
Category
Coins and medals
Date
c. 1795
Materials
Copper
Measurements
29.8 mm (Diameter)
Place of origin
London
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 517662.8
Summary
Copper, A Brighton token with the Storming of the Bastille, reverse designed by Thomas Spence (1750-1814), London, c. 1795. A halfpenny token, issued in around 1796. On the obverse is an officer standing and wielding a sword, with a military camp behind him, and the legend BRIGHTON. On the reverse is a view of the bombardment of the Bastille, the infamous prison in Paris. An officer on horseback in the centre directs the artillery positioned at the left. Mounted in a frame with ten other medals and tokens commemorating and celebrating King George IV (1762-1830, reigned 1820-30) (NT 517662).
Full description
Tokens were issued periodically in the British Isles from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries. Tokens are units of money used in substitution for the official coinage. They were generally produced because there was insufficient official small denomination coin in circulation. By the eighteenth century they also began to be collected and so many were minted for the collectors’ market. This token, one of a group of three in the collections at Anglesey Abbey (for the others, see NT 517662.9 and 10), carries a halfpenny denomination. However, it was probably made for collectors rather than for actual commercial circulation and use. It is a ‘mule’, a technical term used in numismatics to describe a two-sided coin or medal with an obverse and reverse not originally intended for each other. The obverse depicts a military camp with long rows of pickets and tents. The foreground is dominated by the figure of an officer wielding a sword, and the scene is labelled ‘Brighton’. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars between Britain and France, which ran intermittently from 1793 to 1815, there was a constant fear of invasion, especially along the southern coast of England. As a result, large numbers of troops were stationed in Brighton and other Sussex and Kent towns. New barracks were built in these towns, in 1793 in Brighton the Preston Barracks, housing artillery and cavalry units and with stables for up to 1,000 horses. In the same year the West Battery and the East Cliffe Battery were built in Brighton, housing between them twelve 36-pounder guns. The reverse of the token could not be more different. It features the bombardment of the Bastille, the medieval fortress that became notorious as a prison under the ancien regime, was stormed by a revolutionary mob on 14 July 1789, in one of the earliest and most symbolic incidents of the French revolution. The revolutionary Bastille scene was in fact designed by the radical Thomas Spence (1750-1814). Brought up in poverty, Spence dedicated his life to the working poor and to attacking the notion of private wealth. In around 1788 he moved from his native Newcastle to London, where he established himself as a radical publisher, bookseller and author. As well as handbills, tracts, periodicals, and pamphlets, he sold from his bookstall or bookshop large numbers of copper coins, tokens, and medallions, many of which, like his writings, were highly radical in their subject matter. The scene of the storming of the Bastille first appears on a halfpenny issued by Spence in around 1794 (Dalton and Hamer, p. 166, no. 692; Withers, p. 288, no. 692). Spence must have had some form of association with John Skidmore (1748-1823), originally from the Midlands, who had established a foundry in Clerkenwell, London in around 1784 and who by the 1790s had become one of the principal manufacturers of coins and tokens. In about 1796, Spence sold all his dies to Skidmore, however before then Skidmore seems to have been already using some of Spence’s designs. By the mid-1790s Skidmore’s coinery business was the most active in London, a period that also saw the height of a mania for the collecting of tokens. Skidmore seems to have been the main beneficiary from this short-lived fashion. In order to meet and profit from this demand, Skidmore began to intermix Spence’s dies, creating so-called ‘mules’. As has been noted, ‘few of them captured the political purpose or wry wit of the radical’s bizarre extravaganza and some of them made a nonsense of the original message intended; they were simply a ‘jobbing’ enterprise to gull collectors through the creation of freak and costly varieties.’ (Dykes, p. 274). The dies for the so-called ‘Brighton tokens’ were made by the engravers Charles James and Benjamin Jacobs, whilst they were actually marketed and sold by Benjamin Deverell, an orange merchant in Fleet Market. The present token, with the revolutionary scene of the Fall of the Bastille juxtaposed with a depiction of the forces readying to repel any attempts to import the French Revolution to Britain, is just such a ‘nonsense’. It was nevertheless known to Spence, who listed it in an Appendix to his Coin Collector’s Companion, interestingly simply describing the reverse as ‘Bombs a-throwing into a besieged Place.’ It was also illustrated, along with other mules derived from Spence’s designs, in a plate dated 14 December 1795 (Plate 45) from Vol. 2 of the issue of the numismatic journal The Virtuoso’s Companion. Jeremy Warren, 2020
Provenance
Bequeathed to the National Trust by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) with the house and the rest of the contents in 1966.
Credit line
National Trust Collections (Anglesey Abbey, The Fairhaven Collection)
Marks and inscriptions
Obverse: Legend: .BRIGHTON. Reverse: Legend: HALFPENNY
Makers and roles
Thomas Spence (1750-1814), designer Charles James (active 1795-1801), manufacturer Benjamin Jacobs (active 1790s), manufacturer Skidmore & Son, manufacturer
References
Spence 1795: Thomas Spence, The Coin-Collector's Companion; ... a descriptive alphabetical list of the modern provincial, political and other copper coins, London 1795, p. 51, Addenda, no. 354 Waters 1954: Arthur W. Waters, Notes on Eighteenth Century Tokens, London 1954, p. 28, nos. 6-9 Dalton and Hamer 1910-18, 1996: Richard Dalton and Samuel H. Hamer, The Provincial Token-Coinage of the 18th Century, 1910-18, edited by Allan Davisson, Cold Spring 1996, p. 254, no. 6 Withers 2010: Paul and Bente R. Withers, The Token Book. British Tokens of the 17th 18th and 19th centuries and their values, Llanfyllin 2010, p. 333, no. 6 Dykes 2011: David Wilmer Dykes, Coinage and Currency in Eighteenth-Century Britain. The Provincial Coinage, London 2011, pp. 273-75, fig. 301