Peter Kempson of Birmingham produced an extensive series of provincial tokens throughout the 1790s, primarily as a commercial venture exploiting the near-total collapse of official regal copper coinage. By 1797, genuine halfpennies and farthings had been so heavily counterfeited and clipped for decades that much of Britain's small change was effectively worthless — Kempson, like Matthew Boulton and others, stepped into the vacuum. His Coventry pieces form part of a larger topographical series he issued for multiple Midland towns, making them among the more systematically documented of all conder tokens.
DH#286 is referenced in Dalton & Hamer's standard corpus, the benchmark attribution for this series since its 1910 publication.
Peter Kempson of Birmingham produced an extensive series of provincial tokens throughout the 1790s, primarily as a commercial venture exploiting the near-total collapse of official regal copper coinage. By 1797, genuine halfpennies and farthings had been so heavily counterfeited and clipped for decades that much of Britain's small change was effectively worthless — Kempson, like Matthew Boulton and others, stepped into the vacuum. His Coventry pieces form part of a larger topographical series he issued for multiple Midland towns, making them among the more systematically documented of all conder tokens.
DH#286 is referenced in Dalton & Hamer's standard corpus, the benchmark attribution for this series since its 1910 publication.