The small copper token shown below is one of a vast number produced by the Newcastle-born radical Thomas Spence and distributed from his London bookshop, The Hive of Liberty, in High Holborn.
Small-value coins were in short supply in the late eighteenth century, causing problems for people wanting to buy cheaper items and for shops to give change. Many traders filled the gap by producing their own tokens, valued at a penny, ha’penny or farthing, with some entering wider circulation. These traders were thus able to control the design, with many choosing to advertise their business or to feature their own portrait.
Spence, however, used his tokens to promote the political ideas that also featured in the many radical prints and books that he sold.
Spence was born in Newcastle in 1750 to a family of Scottish migrants. He worked as a teacher, and pioneered a phonetic script to help people to learn reading and pronunciation at the same time. But he is best remembered for his utopian land plan based on common ownership administered at parish level. His interest in this idea may well have been sparked by proposals in 1771 to enclose Town Moor in his home city. He would return to the idea of common ownership of the land repeatedly in his writings, gradually developing a more sophisticated set of proposals over the years.
After moving to London in 1787, Spence became a member of the London Corresponding Society, and opened a radical bookshop and publishing business. It was from here that he ran his most successful publication: titled Pig’s Meat; or, lessons for the swinish multitude, it appeared in 72 weekly parts from 1792-94, and featured both his own work and that of other radical writers. However, government crackdowns on dissent during the wars with France cost him his business and his liberty. He would be imprisoned first for high treason in 1794, and then for seditious libel in 1801.
The token shown aboveadvertises Pig’s Meat – and Spence. On one side (fig. 1), it shows a wild boar or swine surmounted by a liberty cap and trampling a crown, sceptre and bishop’s crook. On the other (fig. 2), it lists ‘advocates for the rights of man’: Thomas Spence, Thomas More, and Thomas Paine. Spence never shied away from associating himself with the much better known Paine, though Paine would probably not have approved of Spence’s ideas on common ownership.
This was just one of many designs produced by Spence, some with a straightforward advertising message for his publications, others focusing on radical propaganda and allegorical images. The Fitzwilliam Library in Cambridge holds a number of such tokens, and has an online exhibition displaying some of them.
Spence was not the only radical to use tokens for propaganda purposes, and the London Corresponding Society itself was particularly prolific in using them to publicise itself. There were also pro-government loyalist tokens. One shown here (fig. 3), carries an engraving of the Prime Minister William Pitt, and the message (fig. 4), ‘May Britain still flourish under our good king, and his virtuous minister’.
For all his advertising acumen, Spence died in poverty in 1814. Those taking part in his funeral procession handed out his tokens to the crowd. Though hardly associated with the nascent labour movement of his time, Spence was to have a significant influence on later generations of radicals. The Spencean Philanthropists who followed his ideas were central to the Spa Fields Riots in London in 1816 at which Henry Hunt (of Peterloo fame) was the main speaker, and in the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
Allen Davenport, who had been a Spencean, would later become president of the London Democratic Association and mentor to the Chartist leader George Julian Harney. And Spence’s ideas on the land would echo through nineteenth century rural radicalism in its various guises. Though Spence would be largely forgotten in the twentieth century, the late Malcolm Chase and other historians have since done much to revive his memory.
Further reading
Tokens of Revolution: the Propaganda Coins of Thomas Spence and his Contemporaries on the website of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (accessed 30 July 2024).
Thomas Spence: the Poor Man’s Revolutionary, edited byAlastair Bonnett & Keith Armstrong(Breviary Stuff Publications).
The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775-1840, by Malcolm Chase (Breviary Stuff Publications).
Thomas Spence Society (accessed 6 August 2024).
Life and works of Thomas Spence, 1750-1814, on Marxists.org (accessed 6 August 2024).
