Postby buckler » Sun Sep 28, 2014 2:42 pm
Curiously spoons are almost the only small articles to be ever fully marked prior to the last part of the eighteenth century. The spoon collectors are fortunate in that spoons very often have a dateletter.
Buckles, tongs and nips very rarely have either a town mark or a date prior to around 1790. As Trev suggests , it was almost certain that the partial marking of small articles was to avoid the possibility of fraudulent transposition of marks. As was, in the case of spoons, the distinctive positioning and alignment of the marks.
Bucklemakers ,who because of their casting skills , often made tongs and nips were always regarded as very dubious characters . Not surprisingly , as most coin forgers usually involved a bucklemaker or two in the gang !