https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023/08/10/bishopsgate-tavern-tokens-i/ In the midst of life I woke to find myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London Fri, 11 Aug 2023 09:45:34 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023/08/10/bishopsgate-tavern-tokens-i/#comment-1518192 Fri, 11 Aug 2023 09:45:34 +0000 https://spitalfieldslife.com/?p=196577#comment-1518192 What the Gentle Author doesn’t say about the 17th century tavern tokens – though he probably knows – is that taverns and some other commercial businesses brought them in during the 1660s, after the Restoration of Charles II, because there seems to have been an acute shortage of copper and silver coins. This was apparently a result of the civil wars during the previous twenty-five years: possibly a good deal of currency had been hoarded by anxious citizens for the next emergency, or simply got carried abroad. It had, after all, its own material value.
During the last decades of the century the monetary system, among many things, was reformed and the tokens gradually fell out of use.

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