One letter a year
From 1478 the London assay office, run by the Goldsmiths’ Company, marked each year’s silver with a different letter of the alphabet, so that a faulty piece could be traced to the warden responsible. The other offices followed the same idea with their own alphabets and their own start dates. A letter on its own means little: k has stood for 1745, 1885, 1905 and 1984 in London alone. Three things fix the year.
- The office. Each office ran its own cycle until 1975.
- The style of the letter. Roman capital, Roman lower-case, black letter (the Gothic style), italic or script.
- The shape of the shield. The outline changed at the start of every cycle.
With those three, one table gives the year.
How the cycles run
A cycle covers one alphabet, with some letters left out. Most offices omitted j, and many stopped at u or v rather than running to z, so a cycle is 20 or 25 years long. When it ended, the office started again at a with a new letter style and a new shield.
The year changed part way through the calendar year, when the office’s wardens were elected. In London the letter changed in May until 1974, in Birmingham in July, in Sheffield in July. A piece marked with the 1807 letter was assayed between May 1807 and May 1808, which is why the Desk writes dates as 1807 to 1808 where it matters.
The two things people get wrong
Trusting the letter without the shield. The London cycle of 1876 used Roman capitals in a shield with a pointed base. The 1936 cycle used Roman capitals again, in a shield with a flat base and cut corners. Same letters, sixty years apart.
Reading a duty mark or a maker’s initial as the date letter. The sovereign’s head is a portrait, not a letter. The maker’s mark has two or more letters. The date letter is the single letter in its own shield, and the hallmarks guide shows the full row.
Since 1975
The Hallmarking Act 1973 unified the system from 1 January 1975. Every office used the same letter in the same year, starting with A in 1975 and running to Z in 1999 with some omissions. From 2000 the sequence began again in lower-case. Since 1999 the date letter has been optional, so a modern piece with three marks and no letter is correctly marked.
Finding the year without a book
The hallmark identifier carries the common cycles from 1875 onwards for London, Birmingham and Sheffield, and the unified cycle since 1975. Choose the office, choose the cycle whose letter style and shield match, and type the letter. For earlier pieces, and for Edinburgh, Chester, Glasgow, Dublin and the closed provincial offices, Bradbury’s Book of Hallmarks is the pocket reference the trade has used for a century and costs less than a spoon.
Why the year matters to the price
Georgian silver, meaning pieces marked before 1830, carries a premium over Victorian in most forms, and Queen Anne and early Georgian pieces marked before 1740 more again. The date letter is what proves it. A teapot dated 1770 and a teapot dated 1870 of similar weight and quality sell for very different sums, and a mis-read letter is the commonest reason an inherited piece is undervalued by its owner.
