1 Penny Staffordshire - Stafford / W. Horton

William Horton issued this token during the acute copper small-change shortage that plagued England through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Royal Mint had effectively abandoned regular copper coinage for decades, and provincial traders were left to commission their own tokens or watch commerce grind to a halt. Stafford's merchant community was no exception.

The Davison and Hall reference DH#5 places this among the documented Staffordshire series catalogued by collectors working from Dalton and Hamer's foundational provincial token reference. The 1803 date puts it in the last wave of these issues before Parliament finally moved to suppress private token coinage in 1817.