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.
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.