17th Century, Colnbrook, Thomas Burcombe, Farthing, stag trippant left, 0.95g/6h (Berry & Morley 72; SCBI Norweb 307, same dies; BW. 54A). Very fine and nicely patinated (£40-60)

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Preston-Morley Buckinghamshire Collection: Tokens.

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Collection

Provenance:
F E Baker Collection, October 1977.

Thomas Burcombe, innkeeper of The White Hart, located at the London end of the Bath road through Colnbrook (and now a private house with an attractive Georgian frontage), served as churchwarden in the nearby hamlet of Horton; his wife’s name was Dorothy (†January 1675). It is recorded that Burcombe repaired Colnbrook church with new timber in 1629 and in 1653 he was appointed to receive tolls in order to repair the Bath road.

The full credit for re-attributing the tokens of Colnbrook to Buckinghamshire, rather than Colebrook, Devon, should have been given to the late Francis Baker, rather than to Edwin Hollis (BNJ 1929-30, p.199). It was Baker who, being aware of Manton and Hollis’ revised Buckinghamshire work, perused the Colnbrook parish registers in 1930 and found the information on the issuers that Manton and Hollis subsequently published as their ‘discovery’