Get your minds out of the gutter—I am talking about a piece of struck copper. How long do you actually spend holding a new coin when it arrives? Three minutes turning it under the light? Two minutes checking the rim, flan, and details under a loupe? A quick nod of quiet satisfaction, and into the tray it goes. Total physical handling time: rarely more than five minutes, or at least that’s my experience. I will probably look at the coin again over the next week but then move onto the next acquisition. Yet that modest five minutes invariably triggers hours of pure, unadulterated research pleasure or more, sometimes years! My first Republican Denarius led to decades of collecting, reading, museum visits and a dive into a political history I had not previously appreciated existed. That is the great paradox of coin collecting and now token collecting. With regal coinage, the state has already sanitised the narrative: monarch, mint, moneyer and heraldry. Tokens, however, exist because someone was defying the status quo, solving a local currency crisis, or making a political statement. In this case, this token was to promote a legal victory, memorialise an infant son and provide a memento for supporters. Case in point: I spent several years tracking down the piece below. At first glance, you might dismiss it as one of those "stretched" souvenir pennies struck in a hand-crank machine at a fair or seaside pier similar to one of @lordmarcovan 's great stretched coin giveaways. However, this odd, oval piece of nineteenth-century Welsh paranumismatica represents an artifact struck by one of the most brilliant, uncompromising, and theatrically defiant Welsh figures Victorian Britain ever produced—and it helped fundamentally reshape British law and influenced global law. The Coin (or medal) Issuer: Dr. William Price (MRCS), Surgeon, Chartist, and Archdruid of Wales, Llantrisant, Glamorganshire. Date of Issue: 1884 (following his landmark acquittal at the Cardiff Assizes). Metal & Fabric: Struck in copper (occasionally cited as bronze) on a cast/rolled oval flan; plain rounded edge. Dimensions & Weight: ~37.0 mm × 26.5 mm; 10.20 g – 10.45 g. Die axis: 12 & 9 o'clock. This one is 10,4 g, Mintage: Long reported as 3,000 in older works, modern scholarship confirms strictly 300 were struck. Likely produced in Birmingham by the firm that manufactured his bespoke buttons. Dr Price sold them as mementos at 3 pence each but was driven by idealism rather than personal gain. The nominal 3d charge was meant to ensure recipients valued the piece rather than discarding it, not to enrich the doctor. Price was certainly no materialist. Obverse Design: A Welsh horned billy-goat standing facing right on a rustic groundline, contained entirely within an ouroboros (the serpent eating its tail). Encircled by the seven vowels of the Welsh alphabet: A, E, I, O, U, W, Y, arranged in druidic triads. Reverse Design: Five lines of raised block-capital Welsh text: GWEL JESSU CRIST O YR TAN YN LLYSCO YN LLAW VICTORIA . YM ANWYL GYMMRO YNG GWYDD Y VARN VE BIA CLEDDU TYWYSSOG CARRIAD CORRON CYMMRU JONAWR YR 13 EG 1884. The Five-Minute Look, The Ten-Hour Rabbit Hole Unlike earlier tokens issued before the “great recoinage”, the vast majority of British tokens from the late nineteenth century were strictly utilitarian: colliery beer checks, market porter tallies, or small merchant pennies issued for marketing purposes. The small oval medal issued at Llantrisant in 1884 belongs to an entirely different dimension. Llantrisant is coincidently the home of the current Royal Mint but in 1884 there was no mint there so some comments about minting at Llantrisant is erroneous , the coin would have only been issued or distributed there. My curiosity was originally piqued more than twenty years ago by an article in Coin News. I’ve quietly kept an eye open for a decent example ever since, but in the past decade have only seen about a dozen some of them circulating between dealers. Two were at specialist Welsh auction houses and sold way above what I would pay as they were probably sold to political collectors and not coin collectors who were determined to own one. I was lucky with this one as I found it on Fleabay. When this piece landed in my hands, what followed was a weekend lost in the archives: consulting the Token Corresponding Society Bulletins (TCSB Vol. 6, No. 3), Charles Riley’s 1997 study "Welsh Wizardry", and revisiting Dean Powell’s excellent biography Dr William Price: Wales’s First Radical which fortunately I already owned. Coming to the TCSB literature, it was great to find Edward Besly emerging as a key commentator,although not all together surprising. Besly—who was the longtime distinguished numismatic curator at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff—is renowned among English Civil War collectors for his authoritative work on 1640s coin hoards, emergency siege money, and the provincial mints of Charles I. It seemed fitting to me that a scholar accustomed to deciphering the upheavals of the British Civil War should turn his eye to a Welsh token born out of an equally fierce clash between established authority and radical individualism. Besly noted the specimen in the Museum of Welsh Life at St Fagans, alongside an early transcription by John Ward, the first Curator of the National Museum of Wales. I’ve tracked down Ward’s comments and you can find them easily on the Museum Web Archives. If you examine the reverse, the inscription is not standard literary Welsh (not that I knew!) it is rendered in late nineteenth-century colloquial Glamorganshire dialect, written in Price’s own phonetic, idiosyncratic spelling. John Ward’s early transcription at St Fagans Museum translated the third line as: "See Jesus Christ from the burning fire in the hand of Victoria, my dear Wales! in the sight of the judgement, he owns the sword, prince of love of the crown of Wales Jan 13 1884." While Ward captured the broad spirit, he stumbled on a crucial word that baffled scholars for decades. Ward read the word CLEDDU on the third line as cleddyf (the Welsh word for sword). Modern linguistic analysis reveals that Price was writing phonetically in his local South Wales vernacular: cleddu is the regional spoken form of the standard literary Welsh claddu, meaning to bury. The accepted modern reading changes the interpretation of the entire piece: "Behold Jesus Christ burning out of the fire In the hand of Victoria. My dear Welshman, In the presence of the judgment, to him belongs the right to bury, Prince of love, crown of Wales, January the 13th, 1884." When read this way, the polemic clicks into focus: The Fire: Gwel Jessu Crist o yr tan yn llysco bids the reader witness the burning child. The Crown: Invoking Victoria’s authority (Yn llaw Victoria) while directly addressing his countrymen (Ym anwyl Gymmro). The Legal Core: Yng gwydd y varn ve bia cleddu is Price’s triumphant declaration: before the law, a father holds the absolute, natural right to dispose of his dead as his conscience dictates. The Fire on Caerlan Hill The chain of events began in 1883. At the age of eighty-three, Dr. Price fathered a son with his partner, Gwenllian Llewellyn. Defying conventions, he named the child Iesu Grist (Jesus Christ), boldly proclaiming the boy was destined to liberate Wales from the English landlord class. This was deliberately provocative to Church goers; Price’s father was a Curate and certified as a lunatic and he would justify his own book with his eccentricities which likely influenced William Price in his abhorrence of the established Church. Tragically, in January 1884, at just five months old, the infant died of convulsions. To Price’s medical mind, interring putrefying human remains in saturated churchyards near drinking wells was a barbaric, pestilence-breeding horror. To his neo-Druidic mind, burial imprisoned the spirit in subterranean filth; elemental fire alone purified the vessel and released the soul to the heavens. This is no new philosophy, cremation has been practised globally for thousands of years but not so in Victorian Britain. On the freezing evening of Sunday, 13 January 1884, wearing his flowing druidic regalia, Price carried his son’s swaddled body to the summit of Caerlan Hill above Llantrisant. Placing the child in a ten-gallon barrel of paraffin, he set it alight. As chapel doors opened below, outraged congregations saw the hilltop blaze, formed an angry mob, and charged up the slopes intent on lynching him. The local constabulary intervened just in time, arrested Price, and doused the flames. The Trial that Overturned Common Law Price was committed to the Cardiff Spring Assizes in February 1884 before Mr. Justice Sir James Fitzjames Stephen—one of the Victorian era's most formidable legal minds (and uncle to Virginia Woolf). Refusing barristers, the 83-year-old doctor conducted his own defence clad in an emerald tunic and white mantle. He cut through the theological outrage with surgical precision, demanding the prosecution show him any statute or common-law precedent that made the burning of a human corpse illegal. Justice Stephen agreed. Delivering a momentous ruling, he directed the jury: "A person having charge of a dead body is bound to give it decent burial, but he does not commit an offence if he disposes of it in some other manner, provided that manner is not such as to create a public nuisance." Price was acquitted. He promptly sued the police for the unlawful detention of his son's body, won nominal damages of one farthing, and in March 1884 completed the cremation on Caerlan Hill under police protection. His victory shattered the burial monopoly, paved the way for the Cremation Society to open Britain’s first official crematorium at Woking in 1885, and directly established the foundation for the Cremation Act of 1902. The struck token was his victory lap. Before he died at the age of 93, Price fathered two more children! The Fox Pelt, the Goat Chariot, and the Surgeon Price was far more than an eccentric showman. Born the son of a curate who suffered severe mental illness as I mentioned above, Price proved to be an exceptional scholar. He qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS) at St Bartholomew's in London in 1821 at just twenty-one years old. During the 1830s, Price was a fiery leader of the Pontypridd Chartists, campaigning vigorously for democratic reform and universal suffrage. Prior to the ill-fated Newport Rising of 1839, he gathered weapons and organised local workers. When the uprising was brutally crushed by soldiers at the Westgate Hotel, a warrant for high treason was issued for Price’s arrest. Showing his trademark cunning, he disguised himself as a woman, slipped past police checkpoints in Cardiff, and escaped aboard a vessel bound for France. High Treason was a Capital Offence and likely as minor gentry converted to promoting socialism he would have been hanged if caught. He lived in Parisian exile for several years, frequenting the Louvre and claiming to decipher druidic inscriptions in ancient stone monuments. Decades before modern nutritional science, Price was an ardent raw-foodist and vegetarian, insisting that the consumption of animal flesh was barbaric. He survived predominantly on raw apples, porridge, unpasteurised milk, and mountain spring water, maintaining that salt was a poison that hardened the arteries. He famously refused to treat any medical patient who smoked tobacco or ate red meat. As chief surgeon to the Brown Lenox chainworks in Pontypridd, he washed wounds with boiled water and used sterile techniques decades before Joseph Lister popularised antiseptic surgery. His public presentation was unmatched and eccentric. Attire: Fine emerald-green trousers, scarlet waistcoat (symbolising Tân, the solar fire), white cape, and across his shoulders the complete pelt of an adult fox, its glass-eyed head resting on his brow while the paws and tail draped down his silver hair. Transport: Rejecting horses as unnatural, he drove through the Glamorganshire lanes in an open trap pulled by a matched team of six trained Welsh mountain goats. This was because Price regarded horses as noble and not beasts of burden but many regarded the goats as being an emblem of satanism. Dr Price died at his home in Llantrisant on 23 January 1893, at the grand age of ninety-two. True to his dramatic flair, his final act was to request a glass of Welsh cider; he drank it down, murmured his final words—Er mwyn dynoliaeth; For the sake of humanity—and expired. His will left rigorous instructions for his own cremation upon Caerlan Hill. On 31 January 1893, an estimated crowd of twenty thousand spectators converged upon Llantrisant. To manage the throng and prevent a dangerous crush, his family sold souvenir admission tickets at sixpence each. Price’s body, arrayed in his druidic robes, was placed in a perforated iron coffin suspended over two tons of burning timber and coal. As the smoke rose into the Welsh sky, the great eccentric passed into history, having reshaped British law forever. The cremation of Dr William Price. In his biography on Price, Dean Powell argues that the many colourful anecdotes about Price actually mask his brilliance. He writes; “History is not kind to Price; he’s remembered first and foremost only as the man who pioneered cremation…[but] he was basically a brilliant scholar, an exemplary surgeon, a political activist, who pioneered the embryonic National Health Service in South Wales. He launched the first Co‑operative Society in our principality. Tried to erect the first Museum of Welsh Life…also to re‑establish our national festival, our Eisteddfod, and fought hard for the striking miners and iron workers of the South Wales valleys. Those are the aspects of Price’s life you never get to hear about. There is also this element…calling him a mad man on a bad day, or eccentric on a good one.” The Verdict Five minutes in the hand. That’s all the physical token needed to prove its condition and verify my original interest. The rest? I spent hours lost in revisiting a biography read years previously, discovering the Token Corresponding Society Archives and Welsh Museum Archives. Far more fun than concerning myself with Sheldon points. What is the single coin, token or medal in your trays that generated your highest ratio of reading hours to handling minutes? Key References & Bibliography: • Courtney, P. & Withers, P. (2013), The Token Book 3: Tickets and Passes of Great Britain and Ireland, Galata Print, No. 2457. • Besly, E. M., National Museum of Wales (1998), Notes & Queries: 348 Welsh Token or Medal; Token Corresponding Society Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 3, p. 111. • Riley, Charles (1997), Welsh Wizardry; Coin News, Token Publishing, April 1997, p. 33. • Powell, Dean (2012), Dr William Price: Wales’s First Radical, Amberley Publishing. • Withers, Paul (1986), The Burning Question, Sacra Moneta (reprinted in TCSB Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 112–113). See https://thetokensociety.org.uk/bulletin
