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Description: | Perhaps a copper alloy mining token or 'Truck' from the late 18th to early 19th century AD. The diameter is 38mm.The earliest mining related tokens known from the British Isles are those circulated by a handful of colliery owners and coal carriers operating in the mid seventeenth century. Such tokens are recorded from various locations within the traditional coalfield areas of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Warwickshire, Shropshire, Cumberland, and Derbyshire. In the period 1787 to 1819 Britain was again to resort to the wide scale use of a commercial token coinage. As they were designed and manufactured by the public, they were not limited by any rules or regulations. They were not officially recognized as legal tender by the British government but did circulate in tandem with the country's regal currency. It was private traders and industrialists who brought about the revival in the use of token coinage in Britain during the late 1780s. Unlike the earlier token series of the seventeenth century, of which only a very small percentage were mining related, those re-introduced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were directly initiated by Britain's mining industry whose token issues are highly represented in the overall series. It became common in some areas of the UK for the mine owners to pay their employees in company issued "Truck" (i.e. tokens) that were only exchangeable in the company's own store. Such employee payment systems became very popular amongst many of the UK's industrial concerns in the early nineteenth century. Initially the company owned stores or "Tommy Shops" met a real need for many mining communities as there were often no other shops in the vicinity of the newly sunk pits at which the miners could buy essential supplies. However, during the 1820's many of the mine owners saw their company stores as yet another means of earning them more profit by selling poor quality goods at excessive prices. What is more the Truck System encouraged many miners to buy goods on credit for prices substantially higher than their normal cash value. This often lead to the miners getting into increasing debt with their company store thereby tying them more strongly to their unscrupulous employers.
Original Image | Publisher: | http://finds.org.uk | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/r... | Go to resource |
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