1/2 Penny Cornwall - Penryn / Volunteers

The Penryn Volunteers were a local militia unit raised during the invasion scare of the early 1790s, when Revolutionary France's military expansion prompted British towns to organize their own armed companies. This halfpenny belongs to the broader wave of provincial copper tokens flooding Britain after 1787, when chronic small-change shortages — caused largely by the Royal Mint's near-total neglect of copper coinage — left merchants and issuers to solve the problem themselves. Penryn, a small Cornish port borough already in economic decline relative to neighboring Falmouth, produced very few token varieties, making DH#4 among the scarcer issues from that county.