www.925-1000.com

Members,
I've just added the transcript of the William Weston hallmark forgery trial to the website. It is the third of a series of trial testimonies. It is located at
http://www.925-1000.com/a_OB_Weston1821.html
or can be accessed from the Articles menu.

The testimony of George Miles, inspector & marker for the Goldsmith's Hall, is priceless in its firsthand account of how the hallmarking system worked.

Forum member Trevor Downes (dognose), has graciously contributed a fine analysis and background article to complement the transcript.

Regards, Tom

ps. at one point in his testimony, George Miles mentions that duty charged to the silversmith is 1 shilling 6 pence per ounce. As neither British coinage or math is a strong suit of mine, I'm a bit doubtful of my conclusion that the duty payment actually works out to an astounding 90% tax. Could someone with mathematical ability please crunch the numbers and clarify the situation?
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You are correct.

For those who want to get a taste of the intricacies of British coinage pre-decimalization:

In the absolute, by convention, a penny was 1/240th troy pound or 1/20th of troy ounce (1.555 grams)


This was expressed in a £ having 20 shillings, each of which had 12 pennies. (to complicate matters, luxury goods were usually priced in guineas or 21 shillings, which represented a 5% premium).

Conversion tables:

Pound (12 ounces)= 5760 grains = 373.241 721 6 grams

Ounce (20 ds)= 480 grains = 31.103 476 8 grams

Pennyweight (d*) = 24 grains = 1.555 173 84 grams

1/ 6ds = 18 pennies or 18x24 grains (432) or 18x1.555 173 84 grams (27.99312912)

27.99312912/31.1034768 grams

which was 90%

The easy way, of course is: 18 pennies per 20 pennies(ounce) = 90%

What does not enter into the picture and therefore distorts the equation is the changed purchasing power of the currency, as well as the changed value of the silver.

*d=denarius, Roman word for the penny
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Kerangoumar,
Thank you for the very understandable clarification.
Funny though it may be, I'm outraged that the crown would be so merciless to my favorite tradesmen. They certainly provided incentive for duty dodging and the dodgers now have my sympathy.
Considering the cost of a silver item - bullion + labor + excessive duty - the theory of household silver as a way of banking one's wealth, which sounded so logical in the past, now appears as incredibly poor business sense.

Regards, Tom

ps. to add to yours - £ = latin "libra" or pound
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I am a bit confused by all this mathematics (old age galloping on?).

I am trying to understand how dividing the duty (on 1 ounce of the silver articles assayed weight) in coinage of the realm (18 pennies or "d") by its troy weight of 20 pennyweight (dwt) which is 1 ounce, and saying it is 90% duty is a bit beyond me. 90% of what

This infers that silver and gold, which also was weighed in troy ounces were all valued the same irrespective of what the item was at 20 d per ounce.

What sort of price was sterling silver in those days per ounce?
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Larkfield - what is confusing in this case is that the terminology is the same for the product and the currency.

As for relative values of silver and purchasing power of the currency, that is really difficult to establish as it depends on various factors. One of these is the change from what was termed "representative money" to "fiat currency".

Representative money applied to the early value of the £ as being one (troy) pound of sterling silver; assume that you had a bank note with a denomination of £ 1- you could take it to the bank and demand that you be given one (troy)pound of silver.

Fiat currency is assigned a value by fiat - the government decrees that £ 1 is worth x% of US$1 or whatever else it chooses to use. You no longer can demand the equivalent value in silver. US bank notes used to say"entitles the bearer on demand" and when the gold standard still applied it was theoretically (but not actually) possible to demand that a bank give you the equivalent value in gold (set in 1873: United States de facto at $20.67 to one troy ounce gold). The value of gold, once uncoupled from the currency, rose to ridiculous heights above $800 in the 1970s - partly in reaction to the oil crisis. Theoretically, one would have been able to lay down $35.00(adjusted after WWII under Bretton Woods), and walk away with one ounce of gold - worth $800! LOL


Example: in the 1970s, the notorious Hunt brothers of Texas decided to corner the silver market. Through illegal dealing they succeeded in driving the price of silver up to $50+ per ounce. Many antique items were melted down; production of new flatware, holloware and jewelry, as well as black and white film, fell drastically as its price rose. If you looked at that time period you would see a huge distortion of the historical value of silver. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,920875,00.html

Had the UK still used representative currency at that time, one would have been able to demand one (troy) pound of silver @$54/ounce. Not that you would have got it!


Laughlin, J. Laurence, The History of Bimetallism in the United States , D. Appleton and Co., New York, Fourth edition, 1898, http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Laughlin/lghHBM13.html has information as well as a chart that shows the steep decline in the value of silver in the late 19th C., due to the opening of silver mines in other parts of the world. Without going to a specialist library it is fairly difficult to find such information.

Tom - the concept of silver as a way of banking one's wealth has been a broadly-held idea only in its recent history. Silver, gold, glass, lace and all those other unnecessary objets were - until the mid- to late-Victorian Era - for the very rich, only.

Though I think in the Colonies, silversmiths were happy to oblige many people's aspiration to own a piece or two of silver - which may account for the relative thinness of so much American ware.
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Kerangoumar.
I think you are getting away from the point.
In 1820 the Government Impost or Duty was based on weight of finished item. Using the method used above which is basically dividing duty in pence per troy oz. by what is basically a bullion price for silver per troy oz. and saying it is 90%, is like saying that today U K Government Impost or VAT which I believe is 171/2 % would go something like this:-

Bullion price approx L6.90 per troy oz. On 1 oz VAT would need to be L6.21 to be 90% which would mean a retail price of about L41.7 per oz. I do not know anything about retail prices for sterling silver but I believe this is probably low.
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Larkfield,
Today, bullion prices fluctuate against the currency, at the time we are speaking of, this was not the case, as bullion was the currency
So... One £ sterling was, literally, one pound of sterling.
Because of this, the value of bullion did not fluctuate, it was fixed at 20 pence per ounce.
If you bought a 1 ounce sterling spoon at the time, the cost breakdown would be as follows:
+20 pence for the silver
+18 pence VAT (that's the 90% duty)
+12 pence for the silversmith's work in fashioning the spoon (12d picked at random, labor cost is unknown)
---------
+50 pence total cost (4 shillings 2 pence)
Of course is you wanted to scrap this theoretical spoon later on, you'd recoup only the 20 pence bullion value.

Regards, Tom
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