The royal mint stopped minting all copper coins in 1775 and from 1797 all copper coinage was exclusively struck by Matthew Boulton’s Soho mint, however Boulton wasn’t given a licence to produce half pennies and farthings until 1799.
Counterfeiting was rife in this period and took several forms. Frauds ranged from the crude—where genuine coins were melted and re-struck into two or three underweight copies—to sophisticated “evasions,” which deliberately altered legends or designs just enough to exploit loopholes in the law.
By 1786, contemporaries estimated that up to two-thirds of all copper coinage in circulation was counterfeit, prompting Parliament to strengthen penalties: the Counterfeiting Coin Act of 1797 made forging any copper coin a capital offence, classified as high treason. Even so, enforcement lagged, and private tokens continued to circulate alongside official issues until Boulton’s steam-powered presses at the Soho Mint finally began producing high-quality halfpennies and farthings in 1799, helping to restore public confidence in small-denomination coinage.
This object was audited and researched as part of the Heritage Fund Data Hunters and Story Gatherers project.
