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England – Middlesex / Spence’s – Conder Token
1794 Copper Farthing Conder Token 21mm (4.13 grams)
Reference: D&H 1077
Certification: PCGS MS 64 RB 584314.64/37797993
A STATE PRISONER IN 1794 T. SPENCE, Spence facing left.
ROUSE BRITANNIA., Woman reclining on wheelchair.
Coin Notes:
This coin commemorates how, in 1794, Spence was imprisoned in London on a charge of high treason.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
 Thomas Spence (21 June Old Style/ 2 July New Style, 1750 – 8 September 1814) was an English Radical and advocate of the common ownership of land. Spence was one of the leading revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814.
Spence left Newcastle for London in 1787. He kept a book-stall in High Holborn. In 1794 he spent seven months in Newgate Gaol on a charge of high treason, and in 1801 he was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for seditious libel. He died in London on 8 September 1814.
Land reform and Spence’s Plan
The threatened enclosure of the common land known as Town Moor in Newcastle in 1771 appears to have been key to Spence’s interest in the land question and journey towards ultra-radicalism. His scheme was not for land nationalization but for the establishment of self-contained parochial communities, in which rent paid to the parish (wherein the absolute ownership of the land was vested) should be the only tax of any kind. His ideas and thinking on the subject were shaped by a variety of economic thinkers, including his friend Charles Hall.
At the centre of Spence’s work was his plan, which argued for:
- The end of aristocracy and landlords;
- All land should be publicly owned by ‘democratic parishes’, which should be largely self-governing;
- Rents of land in parishes to be shared equally amongst parishioners, as a form of social dividend;
- Universal suffrage (including female suffrage) at both parish level and through a system of deputies elected by parishes to a national senate;
- A ‘social guarantee’ extended to provide income for those unable to work;
- The ‘rights of infants’ [children] to be free from abuse and poverty.
Spence’s Plan was first published in his penny pamphlet Property in Land Every One’s Right in 1775. It was re-issued as The Real Rights of Man in later editions. It was also reissued by, amongst others, Henry Hyndman under the title of The Nationalization of the Land in 1795 and 1882.
Spence explored his political and social concepts in a series of books about the fictional Utopian state of Spensonia.
The phrase “rights of man”
Spence may have been the first Englishman to speak of ‘the rights of man’. The following recollection, composed in the third person, was written by Spence while he was in prison in London in 1794 on a charge of high treason. Spence was, he wrote,
the first, who as far as he knows, made use of the phrase “RIGHTS OF MAN”, which was on the following remarkable occasion: A man who had been a farmer, and also a miner, and who had been ill-used by his landlords, dug a cave for himself by the seaside, at Marsdon Rocks, between Shields and Sunderland, about the year 1780, and the singularity of such a habitation, exciting the curiosity of many to pay him a visit; our author was one of that number. Exulting in the idea of a human being, who had bravely emancipated himself from the iron fangs of aristocracy, to live free from impost, he wrote extempore with chaulk above the fire place of this free man, the following lines:Ye landlords vile, whose man’s peace mar,Come levy rents here if you can;Your stewards and lawyers I defy,And live with all the RIGHTS OF MAN
This is in reference to the story of “Jack the Blaster” at Marsden Grotto.
Spelling reform
Spence was a self-taught radical with a deep regard for education as a means to liberation. He pioneered a phonetic script and pronunciation system designed to allow people to learn reading and pronunciation at the same time. He believed that if the correct pronunciation was visible in the spelling, everyone would pronounce English correctly, and the class distinctions carried by language would cease. This would bring a time of equality, peace and plenty: the millennium. He published the first English dictionary with pronunciations (1775) and made phonetic versions of many of his pamphlets. Examples of Spence’s spelling system can be seen on the pages on English from the Spence Society.
The rights of children
Spence’s angry defence of the rights of children has lost little of its potency. When his The Rights of Infants was published in 1797 (as a response to Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice) it was ahead of its time. In this essay Spence proposes the introduction of an unconditional basic income to all members of the community. Such allowance shall be financed through the socialization of land and the benefits of the rents received by each municipality.
Spence’s essay also expresses a clear commitment to the rights of women, although he appears unaware of Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Memorial and legacy
Spence is listed on the Reformers Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery in London. His admirers formed a “Society of Spencean Philanthropists,” of which some account is given in Harriet Martineau’s England During the Thirty Years’ Peace. The African Caribbean activists William Davidson and Robert Wedderburn were drawn to this political group. The Society of Spencean Philanthropists (including Arthur Thistlewood) were involved in the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
 George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 1738 – 29 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death. He was concurrently Duke and prince-elector of Brunswick-L?eburg (“Hanover”) in the Holy Roman Empire before becoming King of Hanover on 12 October 1814. He was the third British monarch of the House of Hanover, but unlike his two predecessors, he was born in England, spoke English as his first language, and never visited Hanover.
His life and with it his reign, which were longer than those of any of his predecessors, were marked by a series of military conflicts involving his kingdoms, much of the rest of Europe, and places farther afield in Africa, the Americas and Asia. Early in his reign, Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years’ War, becoming the dominant European power in North America and India. However, many of Britain’s American colonies were soon lost in the American War of Independence. Further wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France from 1793 concluded in the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
In the later part of his life, George III had recurrent, and eventually permanent, mental illness. Although it has since been suggested that he had the blood disease porphyria, the cause of his illness remains unknown. After a final relapse in 1810, a regency was established, and George III’s eldest son, George, Prince of Wales, ruled as Prince Regent. On George III’s death, the Prince Regent succeeded his father as George IV.
Historical analysis of George III’s life has gone through a “kaleidoscope of changing views” that have depended heavily on the prejudices of his biographers and the sources available to them. Until it was reassessed in the second half of the 20th century, his reputation in the United States was one of a tyrant; and in Britain he became “the scapegoat for the failure of imperialism”.
 Middlesex (abbreviation: Middx) is an historic county in southeast England. It is now entirely within the wider urbanised area of London. Its area is now also mostly within the ceremonial county of Greater London, with small sections in other neighbouring ceremonial counties. It was established in the Anglo-Saxon system from the territory of the Middle Saxons, and existed as an official unit until 1965. The historic county includes land stretching north of the River Thames from 3 miles (5 km) east to 17 miles (27 km) west of the City of London with the rivers Colne and Lea and a ridge of hills as the other boundaries. The largely low-lying county, dominated by clay in its north and alluvium on gravel in its south, was the second smallest county by area in 1831.
The City of London was a county in its own right from the 12th century and was able to exert political control over Middlesex. Westminster Abbey dominated most of the early financial, judicial and ecclesiastical aspects of the county. As London grew into Middlesex, the Corporation of London resisted attempts to expand the city boundaries into the county, which posed problems for the administration of local government and justice. In the 18th and 19th centuries the population density was especially high in the southeast of the county, including the East End and West End of London. From 1855 the southeast was administered, with sections of Kent and Surrey, as part of the area of the Metropolitan Board of Works. When county councils were introduced in England in 1889 about 20% of the area of Middlesex, along with a third of its population, was transferred to the new County of London and the remainder became an administrative county governed by the Middlesex County Council[6] that met regularly at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster, in the County of London. The City of London, and Middlesex, became separate counties for other purposes and Middlesex regained the right to appoint its own sheriff, lost in 1199.
 In the interwar years suburban London expanded further, with improvement and expansion of public transport, and the setting up of new industries. After the Second World War, the population of the County of London and inner Middlesex was in steady decline, with high population growth continuing in the outer parts. After a Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London, almost all of the original area was incorporated into an enlarged Greater London in 1965, with the rest transferred to neighbouring counties. Since 1965 various areas called Middlesex have been used for cricket and other sports. Middlesex was the former postal county of 25 post towns.
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.
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