1/2 Penny Regal Imitation - George III left

These brass imitations of British regal halfpennies circulated widely in British North America during a period when the Crown had largely abandoned supplying adequate official coinage to the colonies. Merchants and token issuers filled the vacuum, and pieces like this one — struck to broadly halfpenny dimensions but in brass rather than copper — passed by weight and convention rather than by any official sanction. The CCT BL-9 designation places this among the Blacksmith tokens, a loose family of crude Canadian issues whose actual place of manufacture remains genuinely uncertain; some scholars have argued for a North American origin, others for importation from Britain as blanks or finished pieces.