The mint on the moor
For five years in the 1760s a seemingly never-ending spring of gold coins flowed from high on a Calderdale moor…
THE MOOR ABOVE Cragg Vale in Calderdale is crazed with paths. Its hollows are densely wooded. And though it’s handy for the settlements of Todmorden, Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd, large parts of the moor are out of sight of all them. It’s a perfect place to evade a pursuer, hide a cache of valuables or permanently quiet a nuisance. Which if you were up here in the latter half of the 1700s you might very well have been doing, en route to or from the solitary dwelling that sits high on the shoulder of this beautiful, remote hillside. It’s called Bell House, and though the map tells you it was important enough to give its name to the moor itself, for five years in the 1760s it was more important still. To some it was a ‘royal seat’, to others the centre of a criminal enterprise that threatened to pitch the economy into crisis.
Outwardly, Bell House was home to a threegeneration family of hand-weavers, the Hartleys
– at the dawn of the industrial revolution, one facing an uncertain future, but for now just about carving out a living. Inwardly it was the centre of a runaway counterfeiting network led by eldest son David, recently returned from an iron-working apprenticeship in Birmingham with a profitable set of new skills. ‘Coining’ was the process of propagating new money from old, by shaving or ‘clipping’ small pieces from gold coins, and melting the accumulated results into new currency. Eight guineas would give birth to a ninth. ‘King David’, as he would come to be known, was a dab hand at it, but more importantly he was charismatic enough to get the whole of his community in on the act. Selling the idea by turns as a get-rich-quick scheme, a noble method of staving off the poverty threatened by mechanisation, and the dawn of a utopian new Yorkshire in which money multiplied on the moor, Hartley and his growing band of henchmen collected coins from everyone – from publicans to private individuals – and always returned bearing more. The con worked spectacularly well, not least because soft gold coins could be expected to wear and lighten over time naturally, and because the moor-minted coins were often struck as Portuguese ‘moidores’ – similar to guineas (and in the period legal tender) but less familiar and therefore more difficult to spot as counterfeit. Hundreds of thousands (ultimately several millions) of pounds of fake coins were pumped into the economy – by some estimates as much as nine percent of the entire circulation. But after a few years it was enough to attract the attention of the treasury, and a straight-backed investigator, William Deighton, was dispatched. Stalking the moor in search of suspicious activity, it became clear Deighton had no hope of spying on Bell House, thanks to its exposed approaches. In due time though, and with the promise of a bribe he would never pay, Deighton managed to turn a resentful collaborator, James Broadbent. Hartley was arrested while drinking in Halifax on 14th October 1769. It was the end of the influence on the economy of a squat stone house on the moor. But it wasn’t quite the end of King David’s misrule. Three weeks after Hartley’s arrest, (six months before his eventual hanging) William Deighton was murdered outside his home in Halifax. Before a further informant could spill the beans on that crime, he was set upon by fellow drinkers in another pub and burned to death in its fireplace.
And the moor wasn’t quite out of money. David’s wife Grace continued to live in Bell House until, with the death of David’s father, the tenure ran out on the now notorious family home. She moved to the other side of the moor, buying Lodge Farm for £560, in cash.
Turn to Route 18 in this issue Benjamin Myers’ gripping full story Gallows Pole, published by Bloomsbury.
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“It’s
called Bell House, and though the map tells you it was important enough to give its name to the moor itself, for five years in the 1760s it was more important still.