Victorian Fruit Knife hallmarks Help wanted

[6of1]

I'm trying to identify these UK hallmarks.
Am I right it saying
AH is Aaron Hadfield
The crown is early Sheffield
Lion is the sterling mark
F is the date letter 1803 or 1873

[silvermakersmarks]

Almost right. The date is 1849 from the Victoria duty mark and the style of the date letter.

Phil

[6of1]

Thanks Phil

[bernynhel]

Almost right. The date is 1849 from the Victoria duty mark and the style of the date letter.

Phil

At close examination, the date marks of different eras within the various city guilds appear, to me, nearly distinguishable, as, it seems, to also be the case with the op of this thread.
So am I correct in deducing that the originators and issuers of said marks really would use identical marks used under the reign of a preceding monarch or do I need a new eyeglass prescription?
And if the former is the case, could this have been in consideration of and/or by the urging by silver makers in order that they may reuse existing tooling or at least, if earlier tools had been used up, the models for the earlier tools and save the expense of having to produce new date letter tools and or carve models for new and unique date codes?

Thanks.

- Bill

[dognose]

Hi Bill,

Just a couple of points regarding the punches, only the maker's mark was used by the silversmith and was supplied by him/herself, all of the rest of the marks were struck by the assay office, and it was they, with the exception of the Duty mark, that had their own punches made. The Duty mark punch, which strictly speaking is not a hallmark, was supplied to all of the assay offices by the Commissioner of Stamps office.

It also has to be remembered that hallmarks were not stuck so as to used as a useful system for dating by collectors in two hundred years later, they were struck to prevent any fraud occurring at that particular time, hallmarking is the earliest form of consumer protection. Until around the 1850's, there was no interest in old silver, it was purely sometime useful to put your your money into, and something to have melted down if your fortunes changed or fashion dictated. Outside of the assay offices, and to a great extent inside as well, no one understood older date letter systems, so the assay offices of the period of your knife were not overly bothered if some of their date letters were similar to those of earlier sequences, at that time, it was of no particular consequence to them.

Trev.