English Silver Hallmarks: Date Letters and Town Marks

Read an English hallmark as four separate answers struck side by side: who submitted it, what it is made of, which assay office tested it, and which year. Each punch sits in its own shield, and each was struck by hand, so they rarely line up perfectly.

The practical order is this. Find the fineness mark first, because it is the one that decides whether you are looking at silver at all. For sterling that is the lion passant, a lion walking with its right forepaw raised. Then find the town mark, which names the office. Then the date letter, which gives the year, but only once you know which office to look it up against. The sponsor's mark, usually two or three initials in a shaped surround, is the maker or the firm that sent the piece in.

This order matters because a date letter is meaningless on its own. Every assay office ran its own alphabet cycle, starting in different years and using different shield shapes, so the same letter means different years in London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Dublin and Glasgow.

The town mark is often the fastest dating tool on the piece, because several offices changed their emblem on a known date.

• London: leopard's head. It was adopted as the mark of the London Assay Office in 1544.
• Birmingham: an anchor, used on gold and silver since the office opened in 1773, and later on platinum and palladium as well.
• Sheffield: a crown from 1773. The 1773 Act empowered Sheffield to use a crown for its town mark. After 1904, when Sheffield was allowed to assay and mark gold as well as silver, it used the crown for silver and a rose for gold. Following the Hallmarking Act 1973 the office lost the crown for silver and used the rose on both metals, so a crowned Sheffield piece is pre-1974 work.
• Edinburgh: a castle.

Sheffield is the clearest example of a single mark doing hard dating work. If the town mark is a crown and the office is Sheffield, the piece was assayed within a 200-year window that closed in the mid-1970s. For the crown as it appears on other kinds of silver, including plate, see crown mark on silver.

The date letter changes annually on 1 January. It is not just the letter that changes: the font, the case and the shape of the shield around it are all varied so that each combination can only indicate one specific year.

That is the part people miss. A capital B in a plain square shield and a lowercase b in a cusped shield are different years, potentially a century apart. When you look the letter up, match all four things: the office, the letter, whether it is upper or lower case, and the outline it sits in. Cycles usually ran twenty or twenty-five letters and skipped J to avoid confusion with I.

The date letter has been voluntary since January 1999, when lower standards were introduced to allow competition within the European Community. London still applies it as standard unless a customer requests otherwise. On modern work, then, absence of a date letter is not a warning sign; on a piece that is claimed to be Georgian or Victorian, absence of the whole set of marks is.

A hallmark records an assay, not a biography.

• It dates the assay, not the design. A firm could submit a piece made to a pattern fifty years old, and retailers sold stock for years after it was marked.
• It does not name the craftsman. The sponsor's mark belongs to whoever submitted the piece, which was often a large workshop or a retailer, not the person who raised the bowl.
• It does not survive alteration honestly. A transposed hallmark, cut from a small damaged item and let into a larger later one, is a known form of fraud, and duty-dodging pieces carry marks moved from earlier objects. Marks that sit in a shallow dish of metal, or that show a faint seam around them under raking light, deserve scepticism.
• It does not cover plate. If an item carries a town mark, a fineness mark and a date letter, it is silver; if it carries a crown, a shield and the letters EPNS, it is not.

For the American system, which has no assay offices at all and relies on the maker's own word backed by federal law, start with silver markings on silverware.

Hallmarks are shallow punches, and most failed identifications are failed photographs. Use a single light held low and to one side so the punch walls cast shadows into the recesses, and do not polish first; tarnish sitting in the punch is what makes the outline visible.

Rest the piece so the marks lie flat to the camera, and take one frame filled by the marks plus one of the whole object. Photograph it and the app identifies it. Use the shield outlines and the office you see in your own photograph to look the year up here.