1/2 Penny Victoria Nobis Est

The "Nobis Est" tokens were issued by a consortium of Quebec merchants frustrated by the chronic shortage of small change circulating in Lower Canada during the Napoleonic Wars, when copper shipments from Britain were unreliable and official colonial coinage essentially nonexistent. The Latin phrase on these pieces — roughly "it is ours" — was a pointed assertion of local commercial authority to fill the void that imperial administrators had left.

The Withers reference places this among a well-documented family of merchant tokens, though die varieties within the Nobis Est series show enough inconsistency in workmanship to suggest multiple engravers or production runs across the three-year window.