1/2 Penny Norfolk – Norwich / R. Bacon

Richard Bacon was a Norwich printer and bookseller who issued these halfpenny tokens during the acute small-change shortage of the 1790s, when the Royal Mint had effectively abandoned copper coinage for over a decade. Bacon's tokens circulated locally as functional trade currency rather than advertising novelties — Norwich's textile and market economy demanded small denomination coinage that the government simply wasn't providing.

The Atkins and Dalton-Hamer references place this among the better-documented Norfolk provincial issues. Bacon continued his printing business on the London Lane premises well into the nineteenth century.