1 Penny Worcestershire - Redditch / W. Bartleet and W. Hemming

Redditch in 1813 was already the center of England's needle-making trade, and W. Bartleet and W. Hemming were operating within that industrial cluster when small change shortages forced local merchants to produce their own copper tokens. The national coinage had been effectively absent from everyday trade for decades — the Royal Mint's chronic underproduction of regal copper during the late 18th and early 19th centuries left provincial commerce dependent on private issues of wildly varying quality.

Catalogued under Withers 960 and Davis 12, this piece sits within the well-documented Worcestershire token series of the period.