Owner Comments:
Purchased on 8/5/2013, submitted to NGC in January 2014. Listed in D&H as Rare, downgraded in recent updates to scarce, with other evidence suggesting as many as 650 tokens originally struck. This piece has a nice long provenance, and write-up from the 2005 Spence II sale.
EX: DNW, David Griffiths sale of Oct. 2012, Lot 374.
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EX: DNW, DAVID L SPENCE COLLECTION OF 18TH CENTURY TOKENS (PART II) (28-29 SEP 2005), Lot 1810.
Provenance: Fawcett/Litman Collection.
About 650 struck for Markes Lambe, the Bath trader and numismatist. On 4 June 1794, at a meeting at the Bear Hotel in Devizes, the decision was taken to create bodies of yeomanry cavalry throughout Wiltshire; the first troop, of 56 yeomen, had already been formed at Bishops Cannings on 12 May. Initially consisting of ten troops acting independently and mustered over the following 12 months, they combined to form a single regiment, the Wiltshire Yeomanry Cavalry, on 15 April 1797. It is suggested that these tokens were struck at about that time. Command of the new body was given Sir Charles Brudenell-Bruce, 1st Marquess of Ailesbury (1773-1856), the captain of the Marlborough troop and MP for the borough from 1796 to 1814. In June 1798 all ten troops paraded for the first time at Devizes and marched to Beckhampton Down, where Lady Bruce presented five standards; the regiment then comprised 28 officers and 595 NCOs, a total figure not unadjacent to the numbers of tokens struck, whether by accident or design.