This article presents the life and business of Francis Riddell Reynolds (1772-1846). He was a prosperous businessman, solicitor and brewer in Great Yarmouth, being elected Mayor twice. He was the issuer of two well-known varieties of silver shilling token in 1811, one batch of which was intercepted, and some pieces stolen whilst being delivered from London. Two further shilling token varieties, unrecorded by Dalton, are presented along with a five shillings promissory note, also dated 1811, missing from Outing’s catalogue, is illustrated for the first time thanks to the British Museum.
F.R. Reynolds of Yarmouth: Silver Token and Promissory Note Issuer, 1811 – Gary Oddie
It is worth adding to Gary Oddie’s useful note that Francis Riddell Reynolds was the great-grandfather of Henry Muskett Reynolds (1853-1948), a founder member of the British Numismatic Society, whose impressive and carefully selected collections of Anglo-Saxon and Norman coins were sold at Sothebys in two sales in 1914 and 1919. H.M.Reynolds also donated specialist collections of coins of the Norwich mint and of seventeenth-century Norfolk tokens to Norwich Castle Museum. His father, William Collett Reynolds, a solicitor in Great Yarmouth, will have been W.C.Reynolds to whom Gary refers in his remarks
An excellent addition from Hugh, and a quite unexpected numismatic connection, many thanks. I suspect H.M. Reynolds must have known about his great-grandfather’s token and note issues. I have H.M. Reynold’s coin tickets in the BNS Contributors pages, but still haven’t tracked down an image of him.
With regard to the promissory note of 1811 and the coats of arms which are depicted in the wreath, it is almost certainly showing the arms of Reynolds impaling those of Preston, denoting the marriage between Francis Riddell Reynolds and Ann Preston. Omitting tinctures for the chief and crescents, the arms on the sinister side (the viewer’s right) show…
Erm. on a chief three crescents
Looking through Papworth’s An alphabetical dictionary of coats of arms… there is an entry for the arms of Preston (of Norfolk and Suffolk) as…
Erm. on a chief sa. three crescents or
(Vol. 1, p. 570, published 1874)
which I would say is a very good fit with what can be seen on the note, considering that the chief is shaded in darker, suggesting the tincture sable.
In the second paragraph of your most interesting article—which goes into the ancestry of this Reynolds family—I notice a mention that a Thomas Reynolds died in 1755, citing Palmer’s The perlustration of Great Yarmouth, with Gorleston and Southtown. Having recently looked into this family’s pedigree as part of my own genealogical research, I am pretty confident that the death date of 1755 is in error, and that it should read 1768. See, for sources, his will proved on 10 May 1768 (currently viewable on the Suffolk Archives website as a watermarked image, ref. no. IC/AA1/189/18) or the parish burial register for Bramfield, or the inscription on his headstone at St Andrew’s, Bramfield (see the Find a Grave website). The 1755 date may be the year his wife, Mary, died.