1/2 Penny George III right

This piece belongs to a class of privately issued tokens that flooded Lower Canada in the 1830s when chronic small-change shortages left the colonial economy functionally unable to make change. The British government had largely stopped supplying regal copper to the provinces, and merchants, banks, and speculators filled the void — often at significant profit, since the copper value of these tokens was well below their face circulation value.

The CCT BL-15 attribution places this within the Bouquet Sou family documented by Canadian colonial token specialists. George III had been dead twenty years by 1835; his image here is essentially borrowed iconography, not a current monarch's portrait.