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England. North Wales. Conder Token
Druid
1793 Copper ‘Half Penny’ Conder Token 29mm (9.47 grams)
Reference: D&H 7
Druid’s hooded head left within oak sprigs.
NORTH WALES HALFPENNY 1793, A harp between sprigs of oak.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
Conder Tokens, also known as 18th Century Provincial Tokens, are a form of privately minted token coinage struck and used during the latter part of the 18th Century and the early part of the 19th Century in England, Anglesey and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
The driving force behind the need for token coinage was the shortage of small denomination coins for everyday transactions. However, the demand was fueled by other factors such as the Industrial Revolution, population growth, and the preponderance of counterfeit circulating coins. Because the government made little effort to ameliorate this shortage, private business owners and merchants took matters into their own hands, and the first tokens of this type were issued in 1787 to pay workers at the Parys Mine Company. By 1795, millions of tokens of a few thousand varying designs had been struck and were in common use throughout Great Britain.
Collecting Conder tokens has been popular since shortly after they were first manufactured, resulting in the availability today of many highly preserved examples for collectors. The demarcation of what is or is not considered a Conder token is somewhat unclear; however, most collectors consider Conder tokens to include those indexed originally by James Conder or later by Dalton & Hamer.
North Wales (Welsh: Gogledd Cymru) is an unofficial region of Wales. Retail, transport and educational infrastructure are centred on Wrexham (the largest town), Rhyl, Colwyn Bay, Llandudno and Bangor. It is bordered to the rest of Wales with the counties of Ceredigion and Powys, and to the east by the English counties of Shropshire, Merseyside, and Cheshire. People from North Wales are sometimes referred to as “Gogs”, derived from “gogledd” – the Welsh for “north”.
The north of Wales was traditionally divided into three regions: Upper Gwynedd (or Gwynedd above the Conwy), defined as the area north of the River Dyfi and west of the River Conwy); Lower Gwynedd (or Gwynedd below the Conwy, also known as the Perfeddwlad and defined as the region east of the River Conwy and west of the River Dee; and Ynys Môn (or Anglesey), a large island off the north coast. The division with the rest of Wales is arbitrary and depends on the particular use being made. For example, the boundary of North Wales Police differs from the boundary of the North Wales area of the Natural Resources Wales and the North Wales Regional Transport Consortium (Taith).
The historic boundary follows the pre-1996 county boundaries of Merionethshire and Denbighshire which in turn closely follow the geographic features of the River Dovey to Aran Fawddwy, then crossing the high moorlands following the watershed until reaching Cadair Berwyn and then following the River Rhaeadr and River Tanat to the Shropshire border.
Montgomeryshire, one of the historic counties of Wales, is sometimes referred to as being in North Wales.
 A druid (Welsh: derwydd; Old Irish: druí; Scottish Gaelic: draoidh) was a member of the high-ranking professional class in ancient Celtic cultures. Perhaps best remembered as religious leaders, they were also legal authorities, adjudicators, lorekeepers, medical professionals, and political advisors. While the druids are reported to have been literate, they are believed to have been prevented by doctrine from recording their knowledge in written form, thus they left no written accounts of themselves. They are however attested in some detail by their contemporaries from other cultures, such as the Romans and the Greeks.
The earliest known references to the druids date to the fourth century BCE and the oldest detailed description comes from Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (50s BCE). They were also described by later Greco-Roman writers such as Cicero, Tacitus, and Pliny the Elder. Following the Roman invasion of Gaul, the druid orders were suppressed by the Roman government under the 1st century CE emperors Tiberius and Claudius, and had disappeared from the written record by the 2nd century.
In about 750 CE the word druid appears in a poem by Blathmac, who wrote about Jesus, saying that he was “… better than a prophet, more knowledgeable than every druid, a king who was a bishop and a complete sage.” The druids then also appear in some of the medieval tales from Christianized Ireland like the “Táin Bó Cúailnge”, where they are largely portrayed as sorcerers who opposed the coming of Christianity. In the wake of the Celtic revival during the 18th and 19th centuries, fraternal and neopagan groups were founded based on ideas about the ancient druids, a movement known as Neo-Druidism. Many popular notions about druids, based on misconceptions of 18th century scholars, have been largely superseded by more recent study.
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