The New Coffee House

This trade token, worth a penny, was issued for a coffee house in Exchange Alley known for its sign depicting a Turkish Sultan, Morat the Great. There is a crescent moon mint mark on the token.

Boyne & Williamson (1889) reference London number 967; Obv inscription: MORAT. YE. GREAT. MEN. DID. MEE. CALL (around field, in Roman capitals) Device = Bust of Sultan Armurath (in field); Rev inscription: WHERE. EARE. I. CAME. I. CONQVERD. ALL (around field, in Roman capitals) Device = Coffee / Chocolat. tea / Sherbett & tobac / sould. in Exchaing / Alley (in five lines of cursive script, in field).

See also Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, 1963 No. 838 citing Boyne (1858) London No. 774. The coffee house is known to have been established as early as 1662, as there is an advertisement of the time that describes it, in The Kingdon's Advertiser, as "new coffee house". The coffee house was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and is not known to have been re-established elsewhere, see J. H. Burn, A Descriptive Catalogue of the London Traders, Tavern, and Coffee-house Tokens current in the Seventeenth Century, presented to the Corporation Library by Henry Benjamin Hanbury Beaufoy, 2nd ed. (London, 1855), no. 437. Exchange Alley (now Change Alley), lies in Cornhill Ward and Langbourn, in the City of London.