Georgian Silver Backgound Information Source

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Georgian Silver Backgound Information Source

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Author	Topic: Georgian Silver Backgound Information Source
clive taylor unregistered	posted 04-27-2004 05:57 PM The website oldbaileyonline.org may be interest to collectors etc of English Silver. The Old Bailey was (and still is) the London Criminal Court for serious offenses. This site gives transcripts of all cases from 1717 – 1799, (nearly 50,000) with earlier and later periods to follow . It has a superb search facility, including keyword, location and personal name searches. You can find long lists of minutely detailed goods stolen (a search for “buckle” produces over 2,000 cases) including their values. Totally fascinating to find the range of articles stolen from silversmiths shops. A check on a specific silversmith’s name can often produce a vast amount of background to the man or women as they were often the victim of theft from their employees. And some unlikely smiths prosecuted for forged marks! A great deal of background on the silver trade and assay practice is also to be found, including references of silversmiths supplying other members of the trade. (including regular box loads of London made buckles being shipped to Exeter silversmiths.) Beware of odd spelling - fans of the Bateman family will find Hester at least once under “Ester” for instance. The word “bougre “ baffled me for some time until I realized that “bugger” is the modern spelling.- the language reported is sometimes rather blunt ! A very earthy society in general “I was drunk, I treated the prisoner to bread and cheese and beer. I made an agreement that she should lie with me all night for half a crown. When I woke up both my shoe buckles and the prisoner had gone“ is a more mundane example! “Molly” incidentally is a term for a homosexual man – punishable by death although it seems to have been widely tolerated. The search engine does often go unusable, and refuses to produce anything but error messages, but they normally sort it by the next day. For general background, a good source For specific information, you need luck, but it can produce fabulous information For entertainment, first rate. The link is as follows: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org IP: Logged
secondcourse Posts: 12 Registered: Dec 2003	posted 04-29-2004 03:54 PM Thank you for this information and link! I was preparing an auction description for a 1766 London spoon marked "P.Roker" which I believe is Philip Roker III. Grimwade does not have the mark and says that there is a missing registry for that time but it is assumed that Philip III was working at that time after the death of his brother John. The Old Bailey link provided me with a case in which Philip's wife Elizabeth testified in Feb 1767 about a theft from their shop. Although spelled "Rooker" there is little doubt it is the same family of smiths. Thank you very much for the info about the web site! IP: Logged
frank1014 Posts: 4 Registered: Jun 2004	posted 06-24-2004 11:15 PM Thanks for this GREAT site. Just for the fun of it, I did a search for "silver cup"--forty one pages came up! Details about the descriptions of items stolen, the value, etc. Fascinating the number of silver items that were stolen from some households--including a few items I had never even heard of (e.g. a mustard box?) IP: Logged
clive taylor unregistered	posted 06-27-2004 08:58 AM Mustard was usually in dry form in the eighteenth century, not the semi-liquid paste of today. One sometimes finds sets of early casters where one has no holes - this was for dry mustard. Alas most of these blind casters were later pierced and are often unrecognised. IP: Logged

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