the Napoleonic Wars (1793 to 1815), the Bank of England was forced to suspend the convertibility of its currency with gold and to produce a series of new forms of currency. Between 1797 and 1821, the period known as the 'restriction', new, primarily copper coins and, most importantly, inexpensively produced 1 and 2 notes were brought into circulation. The poor quality of these notes led to a spate of forgeries, which in turn led to a high number of prosecutions led by the Bank itself, for both forgery and uttering forged notes. You can search the Proceedings for cases of forgery, and the Associated Records for the Bank of England's records relating to many of these prosecutions between 1719 and 1821. Following the legal prohibition of most forms of trade tokens in 1817, and the collapse of many small provincial banks in the financial crisis of 1825 and 1826 (which helped to eliminate a wide range of competing forms of paper currency), British cash became more stable from the early 1830s. The death penalty for forging bank notes was changed to transportation (and later imprisonment) for life in 1832. At the same time, other financial instruments grew in ever greater complexity, opening the way to new forms of fraud and theft. Railway stock from the 1840s, and postal orders from 1881, took on many of the functions of currency, and were duly forged and stolen. As the nature of the Central Criminal Court changed, particularly after 1834, fraud and forgery