1/2 Penny Warwickshire - Coventry / Kempson's

Peter Kempson was one of Birmingham's most prolific token issuers of the 1790s, producing series after series of halfpenny and penny tokens for towns across the Midlands and beyond — less as a public service than as a commercial venture, since the tokens were sold to collectors as much as they circulated. The Coventry pieces form part of a larger Warwickshire series he issued around 1797, a year when the chronic small-change shortage that had plagued Britain since the 1780s was finally being addressed by Matthew Boulton's Soho Mint cartwheel coinage, making Kempson's tokens already semi-obsolete on arrival.

The collector market was the real target. Kempson issued many of his tokens in multiple edge varieties specifically to drive completionist demand.