1/2 Penny Lancashire - Manchester / I. Fielding

Fielding's token was issued during the great provincial copper famine of the early 1790s, when the Royal Mint's near-total withdrawal from small denomination coinage left merchants across Britain to fend for themselves. Manchester's textile economy, running on daily wages paid in small coin, was particularly exposed. Grocers and tea dealers like Fielding weren't minting tokens as a vanity exercise — they were plugging a genuine transactional gap that the state had abandoned.

DH#129 in Dalton & Hamer's conder token reference places this among a well-documented Lancashire series, though Fielding himself issued relatively few varieties compared to larger Manchester traders of the period.