Every year Adrian Marsden, the Numismatist for Norfolk’s Identification and Recording Service, logs a large number of finds of seventeenth-century tokens. These small discs of metal were produced by traders to alleviate a desperate shortage of small change after the execution of Charles I in 1649 during the period of the Commonwealth (1649-1660) and in the first dozen or so years of the Restoration when Charles II returned as king in 1660.
A 27th century trade token of Thomas Cannon of Swaffham. Recorded under NMS-00C7DC. (Copyright Norfolk County Council).
The tokens name the men and women who had them made and thus offer enormous potential for further research. Since 2014, when he set up the Norfolk Token Project to foster interest in this unique currency, Adrian has investigated many aspects of Norfolk’s seventeenth-century token coinage, from who used it, how it circulated, and who had it produced.
This last area of research has involved much searching of the records relating to the men and women who had these tokens produced. The results have built up a picture of their lives, of how those lives were lived, where they were lived, and what relating to their lives survives on the ground today.
Since 2018, Adrian has been leading a series of very popular and well-attended Token Tours around the city of Norwich, telling the stories of these token issuers as he guides groups around the city of Norwich as it is today. History is, quite literally, under our feet, and the Norwich Token Tours take us back to these long-forgotten people, visiting the places where they lived and died.
Adrian’s Norwich Token Tours – unique in Britain and indeed the World – demonstrate how research on copper alloy discs found by metal detectorists can uncover all manner of hidden tales of people long dead and – until now – long forgotten. They bring to life the small copper alloy tokens produced many generations ago and prove why recording those finds is so important.