The execution of King Charles I in 1649, the end of the English Civil War in 1651, the horrors of the Great Plague in 1665-66 and the Great Fire of…
The execution of King Charles I in 1649, the end of the English Civil War in 1651, the horrors of the Great Plague in 1665-66 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 affected people’s daily lives in many ways beyond the political and revolutionary turmoil, the huge numbers of dead and the utter destruction.
Shopkeepers accepted credit from the gentry, but not from the man or woman in the street. So, they took matters into their own hands and, technically illegally, employed travelling minters to produce farthing and half-penny copper or brass alloy tokens of their own design for local, low-value transactions; a system based on bartering and trust.
John Morse was a puritan preacher in Watford whose half-penny alloy trade token from 1666, the year of the Great Plague, reveals his ingenuity. A skeleton with an arrow in its right hand and an hourglass in its left hints that death awaits, whilst Mors is the Latin noun for death; a pun on his surname. ‘IM’ represents Iohannes Morse in Latin.Kenneth Jones, a local historian I well remember, who was writing into his 90s, noted in his publication More About Watford that the Rev.
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