1 Penny Staffordshire - Bilston

Bilston, a Black Country ironworking town in Staffordshire, issued copper tokens during the acute small-change shortage that followed the near-total collapse of official regal copper coinage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Royal Mint had effectively abandoned the penny denomination in practical terms, leaving industrial towns to organize their own circulating currency through local merchants and partnerships. Withers 118 is among the more precisely documented of the Bilston issues, a town whose token output was substantial given its dense concentration of foundries and nailers dependent on daily wage payments in small coin.