Morning journal and courier., 1880-08-04
English Plate Marks.
The Origin and Duties of the Geldsmiths
 Hall Company.

Hall Company.
 Articles of plate are exempted from the ca pricious desire of the maker to see his mark upon his goods The Goldsmiths' Company, associated as early as 1927, and regularly in corporated 70 years later, in the reign of Richard H., at present undertakes th1s duty. As the law now stands, all articles of plate manufactured in or near London must be sent to Goldsmiths' Hall, to be tested and to be marked For this assay they receive from the manufacturers fees amounting to some five or six thousand year, and from the Government a fixed salary for collecting the excise duty on gold and silver, paying it into the Bank of England The assayers exercise their functions with skill and impartiality. Small particles are in each instance scraped of the goods to be submitted to the test, and all these are duly analysed. The assayers do not know, and are not allowed to know, from whose manufactured goods the particles have been scraped of, but additional severity in the test is adopted where any manufacturer is found to have often sent goods below the standard The marks adopted by the Gold smiths Hall are five in number. and each has it's own special significance. There is the sovereign's head which indicates plainly enough the reign. Next follows the lion pas sant this is the standard mark and is known to have been in use at the commencement of Queen Elizabeth's reign, but was probably introduced in Henry VIII's The price mark ed is impressed next to it, and was fixed by one of those numerous acts which were pass ed in William HIS. reign to regulate and i'm prove the condition of the coinage. Two other impressions remain unaccounted for. One is the leopard's head, which is par ex- cellence the hall mark and the other is the makers mark, which from long custom IS added to the remaining four. But the period of the manufacture is not left to the mere vagueness of the sovereign's reign The 'tdate letter" supplies the missing infor ma tion Twenty letters of the alphabet are used for this purpose, the series commencing with the first, emitting J and terminating with U. On the 30th of May every year the letter is changed, and the shape of the letter every 20 years. Thus, from 1856 to 1916 or dinary capitals were employed. The letter D would indicate that the article passed the Goldsmith's Hall in 1799. With 1916 com menced the series of small letters, so that date letter of d would fix the year as 1920. Old English capitals followed till 1856, and the next series commenced with small English letters These various alphabetical series are of very old date, the earliest known com mencing with the year 1438. But though London is the chief seat for the manufacture of plate in England, there were other towns which had their own assay officers of halls. Birmingham and Sheffield did large trade, and constant relations were established be- tween the local hall and Foster lane. For this purpose what was called a ts6iet box passed at the end of the year from the coun- try town to the capital. The assayer in Bir- mingham scraped eight grains from every troy pound of manufactured plate. Four of these he retained and at once assayed; the other moiety was carefully deposited in the diet
 box, which contained specimens from all the articles manufactured Once year the box
 was sent to the capital. The assay master of the Royal Mint would then take fair ay-