Conder token

Conder Tokens, also known as 18th Century Provincial Tokens, are a form of privately minted token coinage struck and used during the latter part of the 18th Century and the early part of the 19th Century in England, Anglesey and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

The driving force behind the need for token coinage was the shortage of small denomination coins for everyday transactions. However, the demand was fueled by other factors such as the Industrial Revolution, population growth, and the preponderance of counterfeit circulating coins. 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 Parys Mine Company. By 1795, millions of tokens of a few thousand varying designs had been struck and were in common use throughout Great Britain.

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. The demarcation of what is or is not considered a Conder token is somewhat unclear; however, most collectors consider Conder tokens to include those indexed originally by James Conder or later by Dalton & Hamer.

In Great Britain, a shortage of small denomination coinage had been reported as early as the late 14th century. Such a shortage made it difficult for workers to be paid, and for transactions of daily life to be carried out. The shortages persisted and worsened through the late 17th century and became particularly problematic by the middle of the 18th century. 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. The growing payrolls of factories were nearly impossible to meet for employers with no supply of coins. At the same time, the population growth rate of Great Britain between 1750 and 1800 nearly quadrupled. The situation was only made worse by the outflow of British silver coins via Gresham's law, the preponderance of counterfeit copper coins in circulation, and the Royal Mint's sporadic production of non-gold coins from the late 17th century to the late 18th century. For many years, no copper or silver coins were minted at all, and in 1775 King George III had halted the production of copper coinage at the Royal Mint.

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