1 Penny Staffordshire - Bilston / S. Fereday

Samuel Fereday was one of the most aggressive industrial speculators of the Napoleonic era, assembling a network of Staffordshire collieries and ironworks through heavily leveraged partnerships that would ultimately collapse in the early 1820s, leaving debts estimated at over a million pounds. His token issues of 1811 served a practical need — the Royal Mint had virtually abandoned copper coinage production, and large employers across the Black Country were forced to mint their own wages currency or face the near-impossibility of paying hundreds of workers in fractional coin. Four die varieties are recorded across the Withers and Davis references for this type.