Coventry's corporation had no authority to issue legal tender, but by 1793 the shortage of small regal coinage was acute enough that merchants and tradesmen across Britain were commissioning private tokens to keep commerce moving. This piece is part of that broader conder token explosion — hundreds of issuers flooding the market between roughly 1787 and 1797, until Parliament finally cracked down. The Coventry issues leaned heavily on Lady Godiva precisely because the city had been trading on that legend since at least the thirteenth century.
DH#242 per Dalton and Hamer's exhaustive 1910 census of provincial tokens, the standard reference the trade still uses.
Coventry's corporation had no authority to issue legal tender, but by 1793 the shortage of small regal coinage was acute enough that merchants and tradesmen across Britain were commissioning private tokens to keep commerce moving. This piece is part of that broader conder token explosion — hundreds of issuers flooding the market between roughly 1787 and 1797, until Parliament finally cracked down. The Coventry issues leaned heavily on Lady Godiva precisely because the city had been trading on that legend since at least the thirteenth century.
DH#242 per Dalton and Hamer's exhaustive 1910 census of provincial tokens, the standard reference the trade still uses.