GLOUCESTER TOKENS MARSDEN REVIEW

TOKEN CORRESPONDING SOCIETY Vol. 14 No. 2 BULLETIN March 2023 ISSN 0269 – 0187 Editor Adrian Marsden 12 Blickling Court, Recorder Road, Norwich, NR1 1NW (email: tokencorrespondingsociety@gmail.com) Token Corresponding Society and Token Congress website http://www.thetokensociety.org.uk Subscription (for Volume 14 numbers 1-4) £15 for UK, £20 for Europe (including Eire), £25 for the rest of the world. Subscription for the PDF version is £5 worldwide. Payment should be remitted in Pounds Sterling by cheque or bank transfer quoting: Account name: TCS Membership Sort Code 30-91-92, Account Code: 67503860 Overseas by SWIFT: LOYDGB2L, IBAN: GB18LOYD30919267503860 BIC: LOYDGB21075. Where possible please use your name as the payment reference. A subscription can be taken out at any time. The subscription charging periods for a Volume will cover Bulletins 1 to 4, 5 to 8, and 9 to 12. 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Token Corresponding Society Bulletin Vol.14 No.2 March 2023 Page 45 Gloucestershire Seventeenth-Century Tokens (Galata 2022, various authors, A4 hardback, 256 pages) - A Review Adrian Marsden There have been several catalogues of the token issues of various counties published in the last few years and so it is good to see the Gloucestershire series added to this list. This catalogue has been many years in the making and, as described in the preface, has been the work of several individuals. It should be noted that many of the decisions taken with respect to how this volume was produced were made long ago and so were not necessarily the choices of those who carried this book through to publication. The book begins with an introduction discussing token issue in general and the place of token issuers in the context of the place and period within which they lived. There are some interesting and useful points here such as the fact that often the issue of Corporation or Borough farthings seems to have put a stop to the issue of private tokens, a situation borne out by the evidence from Norfolk on the other side of the country. A discussion of traders’ occupations provides a useful survey of this subject and adds an overview of this county to the record. The statement, however, that the trades of mercer, grocer and tallow chandler were confused on several tokens fails to understand both the fluidity with which token issuers described their profession and how one trade could be subsumed under another. Tallow chandlers, for example, would often style themselves as grocers, and vice versa, whilst other traders such as apothecaries and confectioners would often have attained their freedom as grocers and operated under the aegis of the Grocers’ Arms. As a trader’s career progressed, the way in which they styled themselves would also often change. The remaining section of this chapter offers a useful commentary on the place of seventeenth-century token issuers in their community. The reviewer suspects that the trends discussed here mirror the situation in other counties and the publication of a brief summary of the Gloucestershire evidence here is invaluable. March 2023 Page 46 Token Corresponding Society Bulletin Vol.14 No.2 The book follows with a well-researched section of bibliographical notes occupying some 120 pages. This surely offers just about the last word on the lives of each issuer subject to the emergence of new evidence. Its inclusion – in such depth – is certainly helped by the fact that Gloucestershire is not one of the counties with a very large number of token issuers. It might be argued that some of this material might have been better published separately but this reviewer is glad to see it in print as part of this volume. The inclusion of the Appendix detailing Probate Inventories is a different matter. Probate Inventories, on one level, are enormously useful documents, detailing as they do the contents of a deceased’s house and business premisses. However, their inclusion here, a section covering upwards of 50 pages, seems an odd choice. This reviewer is of the mind that they would have been better published elsewhere and the book might then have been short enough (at about 200 pages) to have been published in a cheaper, softcover format. Of course, the reviewer is unaware of the factors governing publication but the inclusion here of the Probate Inventories still seems of questionable value. The catalogue covers less than 25% of the book. It is thorough and will remain as a tribute to those who had a hand in its compilation. It should, given the extensive biographies verifying the individuals named on the tokens as Gloucestershire issuers, be complete. It is followed by a concordance with Williamson and Dickinson. The information giving the number of examples of each die axis orientation is welcome; the addition of weights might have been worthwhile. There remain other issues. It seems to this reviewer, in the catalogue of a county with a middling number of issuers, that the photographs might have been larger. They are all in colour and at 150% life size; perhaps with a shortening of other elements in this book (or simply by extending the length of the book) a 200% magnification might have been managed. There is also the question of the clarity of the images. A number (such as many in a run of about a dozen pages from page 192) have a pale orange tone that looks as if a rather unsuccessful digital manipulation of the images has been carried out or that the printing palette is awry. Whatever the reason, some of these images lack clarity as a result. In fairness, a number of tokens were photographed under difficult light conditions at the Museum of Gloucester and so we should make allowances here. The decision to use a plain asterisk to represent either a flower, mullet (or pierced mullet) or rosette is confusing, especially when other punctuation marks are replicated in the text. There are fonts which will, in the main, reproduce the range of marks used on seventeenth-century tokens such as Monotype Sorts, Symbol and Wingdings; it would have been better in this reviewer’s opinion, either to compile the catalogue with no addition of initial marks and punctuation or to include everything consistently, perhaps with a key to describe the symbols used in the text. Token Corresponding Society Bulletin Vol.14 No.2 March 2023 Page 47 Perhaps the most startling omission for this reviewer is the failure to include the Corporation issues of Bristol. The reason given, that they were ‘comprehensively covered by Robert Thompson in the Norweb volume for Gloucestershire’ is puzzling. The Norweb volumes, a truly invaluable resource, nonetheless had only life size black and white photographs and the volume containing Gloucestershire was published in 1988. Assuming no new die varieties have since appeared – which has certainly not been the case with the Norwich and Great Yarmouth Corporation issues from Norfolk on which this reviewer has been carrying out research (that Norweb volume was published in 1993) – a catalogue with large colour photographs to add to this book would still have been very welcome. The fact that the decision to omit the Bristol Corporation series – into which I am aware that the late Robert Thompson had delved very deeply indeed – was his own puzzles this reviewer. To his mind, a catalogue described as one of Gloucestershire tokens that omits the enormous Bristol Corporation series cannot be truly complete. The above comments aside, this is an important volume. It provides not only a thorough catalogue of Gloucestershire tokens but also important biographies of their issuers and will surely remain the standard reference work on Gloucestershire tokens for generations. It is handsomely produced and the cover price of £50 for a hardback book printed on glossy paper is not unreasonable. March 2023 Page 48 Token Corresponding Society Bulletin Vol.14 No.2