1/2 Penny Lancashire - Liverpool / Bishop Blaize

Bishop Blaize was the patron saint of wool-combers, and his appearance on Liverpool copper reflects the town's deep commercial ties to the textile trade passing through its docks in the 1790s. This piece belongs to the great flood of provincial halfpennies that private issuers — corporations, merchants, and industrialists alike — struck to relieve a chronic shortage of regal small change that the Royal Mint had largely neglected since the 1770s. Parliament finally suppressed the trade tokens in 1797 following Boulton's Soho Mint contract.