DESERT MOON NEWSLETTER, ISSUE 7, February 8, 2025
- desertmoonnm
- Feb 8
- 2 min read
Conder Tokens
Hi Folks,
Do you know about Conder Tokens? In brief, in the late 18th century, Great Britain had an extreme shortage of coins for everyday use. This included the farthing, ½ pence, pence, and all other smaller denomination issues. In addition, about 70% of the coins in circulation were counterfeit. The Royal Mint shut down as their way to counter the problem as people were melting coins for their bullion value and they just could not have that. Hence a crisis for coins used in commerce was in full bloom. Not surprisingly, as folks needed small denomination coins to make transactions, in 1787, the Paris Mine Company issued tokens to counter the shortage. This was followed by numerous others and continued in the 1790’s when the crisis began to be alleviated by Royal Mint production of pence and two pence pieces.
The result was the issuance of 1000’s of different types of tokens. Many uncirculated examples still exist today in pristine uncirculated condition as they were collected from the time of minting. They are called ‘Conder’ tokens because James Conder was one of the first to prepare a catalog for these in 1798. The leading reference book today about Conder tokens is by R Dalton & SH Hamer – The Provincial Token-Coinage of the 18th Century 1910-1918. It has gone through numerous printings and updates since. The copyright for the book has expired, so now there are several free online versions, for example:
and
A book based on the Conder series and ongoing happenings in Great Britain that is an excellent read is Good Money: Birmingham Buton Makers, The Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage 1775-1821, by George Selgin:
This book analyzes the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the effort to improve the minting process at the Soho Mint in Birmingham by director/owner Matthew Boulton. The key was improvements of James Watt’s steam engine. Of course, this led to applications of the steam engine elsewhere and the Industrial Revolution took off. If not for Conder tokens, where would we be today?
Multiple social, economic, and political issues were depicted on the tokens issued. The example above is from the ‘End of Pain’ series, which I now have several different issues of. Below is another popular token protesting slavery:
To sum up, this is an incredible series to collect in terms of history, diversity of themes, and for obtaining perfectly preserved numismatic pieces over 200 years old, and they are very affordable.
I have 6 newps that go live today on the website and more will be listed in the upcoming weeks. Please contact me at desertmoonnm@yahoo.com if any of these are of interest.
Thanks for reading!
Best, DM
Here are some new selections I just listed on the website:
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