1/2 Penny Middlesex - Political and Social Series / Newton

The Middlesex Political and Social Series conders were produced by private manufacturers during a genuine copper shortage — the Royal Mint had effectively abandoned small denomination coinage for decades, leaving trade tokens to fill the gap. Oblivious to the irony, Parliament would eventually suppress the private token industry in 1817 just as it was solving the very problem official coinage had created.

DH#1033 references Dalton & Hamer's definitive cataloguing of these issues, the standard reference for conder tokens since its 1910 publication.