DORSET SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TOKENS. 51 



described. There are two or three instances in which the usual 

 practice of placing the initials of the surname over those of the 

 Christian names of the husband and wife has been departed from : 

 e.g., those of John Swetnam, of Melcombe Regis ; William Molby, 

 of Sherborne ; and James Cane, of Stalbridge. These are the only 

 ones that I am aware of in which this has been done.* 



The first person who would appear to have made a collection of 

 Dorset tokens (at least of those that have now come into public 

 hands) was the late Dr. Browne Willis, F.S.A., the eminent 

 antiquary, who was born at Blandford in 1682 and died in 1760. 

 He presented his collection of coins in 1741 to the University of 

 Oxford, and amongst them his Dorset and other tokens. These 

 are now in the Bodleian Library, where I have myself inspected 

 them ; but the Dorset ones do not consist of more than about 

 thirty specimens, if I remember rightly. 



Then there is the national collection in the British Museum ; 

 but at the time I first went to see them, some two or three years 

 ago, they were practically inaccessible to those interested in the 

 tokens of any particular county, owing to their being arranged 

 solely in alphabetical order under the names of the issuers instead 

 of places. 



Surely the value and charm of such a collection lies not in the 

 number of tokens issued by persons of any particular surname all 

 over England, but in the living interest the people of any 

 particular county or town take in these quaint evidences of a 

 bye-gone age, and in the topographical associations that cling to the 

 names of so many of these old issuers. Mr. R. S. Poole, the 



* NOTE. Since writing this paper I have been favoured by Mr. A. 

 Palmer, of Lyme Regis, with an inspection of a very interesting and 

 curious token found amongst the rubbish during the restoration of the old 

 parish church of Lyme. It bears the inscription LYME, 1653, and R.S. in 

 the centre, on one side only, the other being perfectly plain or else worn 

 away. It is the size of an ordinary farthing token and is made of some 

 white metal, such as lead which has now become hard or pewter, and is 

 the only token made of white metal in Dorset that I am aware of, and is in 

 all probability absolutely unique. 



