posted 08-29-2000 10:06 AM            

It is not unusual for me to come across an English spoon, like this one, with partial hallmarks. In most cases, including this one, it is the town mark that is usually missing. This poses a conundrum, as I am never sure which assay office to examine to determine the actual date. Furthermore, the shape of the date letter "surround" almost never exactly matches any illustrated in Jackson.

Case in point: This rather ugly little teaspoon is in the Hanoverian style, which seems to point to a date in the mid-18th century. We have a lowercase h date letter, the lion passant, and a badly distorted maker's stamp of TL. In the London date cycles, the lowercase h appears twice in the 18th century, 1743-44 and 1783-84. The shape of this particular stamp is closer to the 1783 than 1743, but the style of the spoon is more 1743. The style of the lion passant doesn't look like either date.

My questions are these:

1.) Given a piece of flatware with no town mark but a date letter, is it reasonable to assume a London origin, or should I be looking at the other assay offices, which pose several other possibilities for a lowercase h. In this case, all of the suitable TL maker's marks seem to be from London.

2.) On flatware at least, it seems that the shape of the date letter stamp is often very different from the accepted norm, as illustrated in Jackson. Is this just a distortion associated with the making of the piece, or did the actual shape of the stamp vary somewhat? Were more than one stamp used by each assay office? I notice that Jackson illustrates some variation of date letters for certain cycles; was this common?

posted 10-26-2003 01:39 PM            

Punches used on smaller objects often vary somewhat in form from the larger ones usually depicted in the tables.

Also, the spoon is a late hanoverian, as indicated by the lack of a long ridge on the handle.

posted 10-27-2003 09:46 AM            

This reminds me of a piece I saw a few years ago. I did a post about it in the Silver Stories forum, I think, but it bears repeating. The piece was a coin silver tablespoon by Adrian Bancker; obviously a very desirable early New York piece. What was odd, though, was that it was in the Old English style, with a very flat front, period block initials ot the front, and a very long midrib on the back. Close examination revealed that the spoon had once been a typical Hanoverian style. At some point long ago the stem had been cut off just above the marks, the handle flipped over and reattached. I suppose it was done in the late 18th C, when Old English replaced the Hanoverian style, and the owner did not want to pay to have the spoon completely refashioned. A real curiosity!