Shrewsbury Halfpenny 1793

The Salop Woollen Manufactory token was issued during the great copper token boom of the early 1790s, when a chronic shortage of regal small change — the Royal Mint having struck virtually no copper coinage since 1775 — forced provincial employers and tradesmen across Britain to produce their own. For a wool manufacturing town like Shrewsbury, paying workers in usable fractions of currency was a practical necessity, not a commercial novelty.

Dalton & Hamer 427 is among the more straightforward Shropshire pieces, without the contested die marriages that complicate attribution in some of the more prolifically reissued Midlands tokens.