1/2 Penny Yorkshire – Hull / J. Garton

Hull's late-eighteenth-century trade tokens emerged from a practical crisis: Royal Mint output of regal copper was so inadequate through the 1780s that northern commercial towns were functionally starved of small change. Jonathan Garton & Co., operating in the provision and grocery trade, issued this halfpenny to keep transactions moving at street level. The Dalton-Hamer reference DH#20 places it within a well-documented Hull sequence, though surviving die varieties suggest at least some production inconsistency across the run.

The token boom was effectively ended by the Coin Act of 1797, which authorized Matthew Boulton's Soho Mint to flood the market with the machine-struck "cartwheel" coinage.