Literary and Historical Notes.

A XVII CENTURY MS. LIST OF

TOKENS.

and

IN the eighteenth century, when antiquarian interest was concerning itself more particularly with the works of the Greek Roman periods, very few coin collectors would have thought the humble, and comparatively recent, currency of the traders and tavernkeepers worthy of their attention. therefore appear strange that tokens were esteemed by certain collectors as early as the middle of that century and, still more so, that one or two collections, at least, were formed in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

It may

A MS. list of tokens which has recently come into my hands is possibly the very earliest collector's catalogue which has been preserved, for there seems to be little doubt that it was compiled about the year 1680.

The catalogue which Browne Willis made of his token collection, in or about 1742, is probably the earliest known one, but there is no mention of it in any of the standard books on tokens, although an oft-quoted authority, namely Snelling, notes that he, Browne Willis, was the first to form such a collection. The MS. which I am about to describe, and to give extracts from, would have been contemporary with a still earlier collection formed by Ralph Thoresby in the seventeenth .century. There is, howeer no likelihood of this list having been compiled by Thoresby; for his collection seems to have consisted of less than two hundred pieces, whereas the list I speak of enumerates over a thousand specimens.

Before proceeding to give particulars of this late seventeenth century list it may be of interest to mention some collectors of tokens concerning whom records have been found.

The earliest collector of whom there seems to be any mention is Ralph Thoresby (16581725), the Leeds antiquary and topographer. According to the diary of Thomas Hearne, the Thoresby collections of coins and medals were already known in 1682, and it seems more than likely that he had begun to form his small collection of tokens before that date, although the prosy Diary of this Yorkshire Pepys" fails to disclose more than passing references to his numismatic collections. On his death in 1725 these collections passed to his son Ralph, and it was

on

not until after the son's death in 1764 that the Thoresby museum and library were dispersed. In the sale at Sotheby's rooms March 6, 1764, were two lots, each containing 72 Town pieces and Tradesmen's Tokens," and these, being these, being "put up together, fetched 56s., or about 5d. a piece. That this decried coinage, the average face

value of which was about a halfpenny, should have commanded such a price at auction is lector was already awake to its interest and evidence that the mid-eighteenth century colpotential value.

The few tokens included in the collection of coins and medals bequeathed to Corpus Hallifax in 1722, is another indication that Christi College, Oxford, by Dr. William this irregular currency was beginning to have some "collector interest," even in Oxford.

and Coinage' (1766) states that "the first Snelling, in his 'View of the Copper Coin person who appears to have made a collection of these tokens was the late Browne Willis esq: and is the compleatest that has come under our notice.

...

Browne Willis, who in 1745 is found writing to a fellow county-man in Buckinghamshire lamenting my empty tables,' explaining that he has versity of Oxford with my cabinet of above twelve hundred tokens, is perhaps the best known of the eighteenth century collectors.

in

His cabinet of over nine hundred specimens was presented to the University 1739, and he appears to have added to these another 150 or so at intervals from then the Bodleian Library' (1890) gives the period until 1753. (W. D. Macray's Annals of the Bodleian Library' (1890) gives the period as 1739-1750). Formerly the collection was in the Bodleian Library, but in 1921 it was transferred to the Ashmolean Museum.

Along with it are four quarto volumes in MS., containing a mass of information in the form of notes on the origin of tokens, their places of issue, names of contemporary collectors and a catalogue titled "An Alphabetical Series of the Traders Pennys, Half Pennys and Farthings set out by Private Persons inter 1648 and 1673. Collected by B. W. from 1732 to 1742."

In an introductory note to Vol. i he says:

Anno 1649 (or somewhat earlier) in the Times of Anarchy and Confusion, Private Persons took upon them to coin their own Farthings and Half-pence and did so till 1674, when by Proclamation this kind of Money was decryed and the King's Copper Farthing and Half Pence took Place. [During this period] Citys, Towns, Parish Officers, Companys and Collieries minted

Collectors of Traders' pieces-some in all Cabinets, but Chiefly in Sir Hans Sloane; Mr. Sadler; Mr. West; Mr. Yarrow of [P]; Mr. Gill of York; Mr. Collier of Huntingdon; Dr. of Colchester; Dr. Ducarrell of Drs. Comms; Dr. Warren of Cambridge; Capt. Bottle has some; Mr. Leek, Clarencieux; Mr. Mussell of Bethnal Green; Mr. Smith of the Tower; Mr. Earl of Bedford Row; Mr. Busk of the Tower; Mr. Gifford of Ormd. Square. The last note book is titled Additional Tokens from Browne Willis, 1748-1753.' contains short lists of coins and tokens which presumably accompanied his supplementary donations to the University as they are mostly in letter form and addressed to "Mr. Humphrey Owen Librarian att Oxford (appointed to the Bodleian Librarianship, 1747). One of these letters to Dr. Owen is dated from

It

In the Ashmolean also is another, rather meagre, MS. Token Catalogue, compiled by the Revd. Dr. Andrew Gifford,

one a

Assistant Librarian at the British Museum from 1757-1784. Part of his collection of seventeenth century tokens went to the British Museum and part to Oxford University. The MS. catalogue now in the Ashmolean is prefixed by two communications, covering letter from J. H. Burn dated Aug. 19, 1848, apparently assigning the catalogue to the Bodleian; the other, a memorandum from Browne Willis, at Whaddon, dated 23 Market Tokens May, 1752, giving a list of Wanting in Browne Willis' Cabinet," and addressed to "Mr. Gifford at his House in Queens Square Court in Ormond Street." The volume is titled 'A Table of English Copper & Brass Coins In the possession of A. Gifford. 1748.'

Dr. Gifford's methods of recording his tokens, although leaving a good deal to be desired when compared with more modern ones, are certainly an improvement on those of Browne Willis'; he does at least differentiate between the two sides of the coin.

Two other early eighteenth century token collectors were Thomas Martin and William Cole. We find from William Cole's Alphabetical Collections for an Athenae Cambrigiensis' (B.M. Addit. MS. 5833. folios 163b. & 191b.) that Honest Tom Martin of Palgrave "had compiled a list of his collection of Norfolk and Suffolk tokens in 1751, to which Cole adds a list of his own tokens in 1776; both of these are of course by the hand of William Cole.

When it is remembered that the issuing of these tokens was confined to a bare five and twenty years, from 1648, that is, until the proclamation of 1672, (though in Chester they seem to have persisted till 1674, and in Ireland till 1679), it is perhaps remarkable that they should have come in for so much attention by the middle of the eighteenth century.

house in the days of anarchy amongst us presumed to stamp and utter."

Miles Davies, "that strange eccentric fellow,' as William Cole calls him, bestows a word or two in commendation of their use. In his Athenæ Britanico' he says but then the Traders were not obliged to take one another's Coyns, or such like Token-Propriums, no more than they were obliged to take one another's words; yet if one of their own coyn (which generally had their respective Names or Tokens stamped therewithall) was ever offered them in the Way of Dealing, they were obliged, by the very Tendency of our Common Law to retake them at the same Rate that they were Tokens for from what Hand so ever they came.

Between the years 1765 and 1795 the Revd. Richard Southgate (sometime curate of St. Giles-in-the-Fields and Assistant Librarian at the British Museum, 1784-1795) had got together "the most neat and compleat series of English Pennies to be found in this country." On his death in 1795 his collections were dispersed and passed into the hands of Samuel Tyssen (of Narford Hall, Norfolk) by private treaty, for £1,500. (Nicholl's Lit. Anecdotes ').

J. H. Burn, in his introduction to the Catalogue of the Beaufoy Collection of Seventeenth Century Tokens quotes Snelling's opinion, given in 1766, that the most copious [collection of tokens] we know of at present is that of Mark Cephas Tutet Esq and several of the finest specimens are in the collection of Thomas Hollis, Esq., of Pall Mall" (No. 19, Pall Mall). Burn goes on to say that the Tutet collection of Traders' Tokens and Town Pieces comprised about 1,800 coins, that it was dispersed in 1786, and, what is of particular interest to us in this connection, that his MSS. descriptive of those tokens. [are]... in the writer's

[Burn's] possession.

At 12 S. vi. 272 MR. ALECK ABRAHAMS mentions "a copious and useful MS. volume describing seventeenth century tokens" of nearly 500 pp. Qto., which was at that time (1920) in his possession. He attributes the date of it to the late eighteenth century. The MS. had been in the Beaufoy library, and MR. ABRAHAMS was inclined to think that it might well have been the catalogue of the Tutet collection which Burn alludes to, for he goes on to say, anything that was his [Burn's] speedily became Beaufoy's." Unfortunately MR. ABRAHAMS has lost track of this intensely interesting document, and I should

be very glad if any reader can tell me into whose hands it has now come.

Among other eighteenth century collectors of tokens should be mentioned Dr. Andrew Coltee Ducarel, for nearly thirty years Keeper of the Library at Lambeth Palace (1757-1785), Miss Banks, and Sir Hans Sloane. The last two bequeathed their collections to the British Museum. Burn refers also to the Hodsall collection which was amongst those acquired by Mr. Samuel Tyssen.

cen

Towards the end of the eighteenth tury James Conder, a haberdasher of Ipswich, formed an important collection of contem porary tokens, and in 1798 he published a work in 2 vols entitled 'An arrangement of Provincial Coins, Tokens and Medalets, issued in Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies within the last twenty years from the farthing to the penny size.' In the British Museum is a copy of this, the first, edition interleaved with engraved specimens and copious notes by W. Young.

The foregoing notes give a brief account of the more important collections of tokens which had been formed up to the end of the eighteenth century and of the few catalogues of those collections which have been traced. Judging from the information available it appears that the catalogue of Browne Willis's collection, circa 1750, was the earliest one we knew of previous to the appearance of the MS. which has recently come into my possession.

utmost

I should perhaps say here that my connection with this list is a purely fortuitous one. I am not a collector of tokens and have no particular interest or knowledge of them beyond that which has been incidental to my researches in relation to Tradesmen's cards and Shop Signs. I therefore offer my comments on this catalogue with the diffidence, fully conscious that many of the readers of these columns could have brought to the subject an erudition which I do not possess. It has been gratifying, also, to find that records of many tokens have been brought to light which have not previously been published.

However, as chance has thrown the list in my way, I have enjoyed the fascinating pursuit of identifying the rather haphazard renderings of the inscriptions with the precise and accurate readings of them given by later authorities. Beaconsfield.

AMBROSE HEAL.

(To be continued).

THE BLOODY BROTHER.' FEW plays outside the Shakespearean canon have given so much trouble to critics as 'The Bloody Brother.' Opinions are still divided upon the questions both of authorship and of date. Lawrence assigns the play to the year 1624, while Mr. R. Garnett has shown the derivation of some part of the work (IV. ii.) to be from a Latin play, Querolus,' printed in the year 1619. It may be, however, that the manuscript of this Latin play circulated pretty freely before going to the press. Probably Mr. E. H. C. Oliphant is nearer the truth when he postulates, in his monumental work, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher,' the period 1614-16 as the time of the play's revision by Fletcher. Where one may reasonably differ from that authority is in holding that that period more likely witnessed the first presentation of 'The Bloody Brother' than its subsequent revision.

Certain definite conclusions regarding the authorship of the tragedy have been reached. All critics are agreed in assigning Act II, part of Acts III, i, and V, ii, to Fletcher: most give to Massinger Acts I and V, i; some credit Johnson with IV, i, and ii; but the identity of the author who supplied the rest has been merely a subject of wild conjecture. Middleton, Rowley, Field, Daborne, Wilkins and Cartwright have all had their champions, while the claim of Chapman-the owner of the most freakish tragic style of his timehas been consistently ignored. That the evidence on his behalf is fairly strong will, I think, be granted.

There may be question as to whether The Bloody Brother' is a real partnership playthat is to say, whether each dramatist had his allotted task in the co-operative work-or whether it is merely a revision of an earlier work undertaken conjointly by Fletcher and Massinger. If the latter supposition be the true one, the first Act is so entirely Massinger's that one may well believe that for this he has scarcely used the old material at all, an example that Fletcher seems to have followed in Act II. It is not until the third Act is reached that we come upon Chapman matter unalloyed though, probably, considerably cut. The first scene excluding the episode, characteristically Fletcher's, Edith's pleading for her father's life-contains the following Chapman words and phrases: affects, amendful, assay," 99 "author (verb), in chief," exempt," exhales,' fiery,"

avert,'

empery,"

99 66

of

Yet false policy.

Would cover all, being like offenders hid That (after notice taken where they hide) The more they crouch and stir the more are spied.

The idiom and political thought of Chapman are seen again in these four lines:

I am exempt by birth from both these curbs,
And sit above them in all justice since
I sit above in power: where power is given,
Is all the right supposed of earth and
heaven.

Exempt has been noted by Mr. J. M. Robertson as a Chapman word, the too freall is another peculiarity of quent use of Chapman's, and both the meaning and the phrasing of the above lines are echoed in Bryon's Tragedy,' V, i:

We sit above the danger of the laws, We likewise lift our arms above their justice

and, differently expressed, in the same

scene:

Princes, you know, are masters of their laws

And may resolve them to what form they please.

This last quotation illustrates Chapman's use of the parenthetical "you know," of which there are two instances in the postFletcher part of this scene in 'The Bloody Brother':