1 Penny Tavistock - Devon Mines

The Devon copper mines issued their own token coinage during the acute small-change shortage that plagued Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — a vacuum created largely by the Royal Mint's decades-long failure to produce adequate regal copper. Tavistock sat at the heart of the Tamar Valley mining district, where tin and copper extraction had driven a local economy largely cut off from reliable circulating coin. Mine operators paid wages and accepted tokens at company shops, a system that critics attacked as exploitative but which, in practice, often simply filled a genuine void.

Davis #23 is among the later provincial issues, struck just two years before Parliament's Suppression Act of 1813 effectively ended the private token trade.