Unmarked silver - how common?

[cbc58]

Admin - this is a question that can have no photo or mark.

How common is it to find unmarked silver from Britan or Scotland ?
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[admin]

It exists, there is no way to assess how much exists, but probably only a very small percentage. It is far more likely for silverplate to lack marks of any sort.

Tom
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[dognose]

Hi,

Agree with Tom, you will always get situation were the buyer has absolute trust in the silversmith and wants to keep the cost down and so they are unmarked or marked in a way to resemble Hallmarks (Duty Dodgers).
Of course the unmarked ones are often discarded as they are passed from generation to generation by people not knowing that they are silver so that those that survive today will be of a much smaller percentage of that that existed originally.

Trev.
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[Hose_dk]

The question was Brittan and Scotland - and I dont know.
But other countries. Some lack a system requering marks.

And in other countries like Denmark - the marks where regulated by law. But in many cities no guardien was available so for several hundreds of years silver was produced with incomplete marks. In fact only in Copenhagen the system worked. In all ather danish towns it did not. So large amounts of silver without fully marks exists. Same goes for Norway.

Where as in Sweden it is very unusual that silver is not fully marked.
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[SilverSurfer]

There is a problem in that how might an unmarked piece be attributed to Britain/Scotland. For a reliable attribution, the pattern would have to be strongly identified to a certain area or maker. That's a tall order, especially for flatware, which is most of what I collect. For example, there was a fair amount of unmarked American flatware that much resembles Scottish make, the Oar Pattern (shoulderless early Fiddle Pattern) in particular. As opposed to this, I have a number of provincial Scottish pieces, including some outright duty dodgers (have to admire that old smuggler, William Jamieson of Aberdeen, I hope he kept his head), but they all have some type of mark, if only a maker's mark and/or pseudo town hallmark. An unmarked flatware piece in the Brit/American form would almost always have to be attributed to an American origin, unless there were essentially irrefutable shape characteristics traceable to a specific Brit region, town or maker. I suspect that to be a very rare occurrence.

SS
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