1 Farthing Cambridgeshire - Chatteris / W. Curtis

Chatteris, a small Fenland market town, was chronically underserved by Royal Mint copper during the Napoleonic Wars period, when official small change had effectively dried up across provincial England. Local traders filled the gap themselves. Curtis issued these pieces under the same pragmatic logic driving hundreds of similar nineteenth-century tokens — without them, making change for ordinary transactions was genuinely difficult.

Davis 2 is the commoner of the two recorded varieties for this issuer.