How to read a British silver hallmark

Britain has been marking silver since the thirteenth century, which makes a British hallmark the oldest form of consumer protection still in daily use. It is also, for anyone trying to work out what an object is, the most informative thing on it. A dinner plate might be anonymous; a hallmarked dinner plate can be pinned to a city and a single year.

The current system is set out in the Hallmarking Act 1973, and it is an offence to sell an article as gold, silver, platinum or palladium in the UK without one.

The four marks

Read them left to right, though the order on the piece varies.

1. The sponsor’s mark. Two or more initials in a shaped surround. This is whoever submitted the article for assay — usually the maker, sometimes the retailer who commissioned it. It is the mark that gives you a name, and only by looking the initials up in the assay office’s register.

2. The standard mark. What the metal is. On English sterling this is a lion walking with one paw raised — the lion passant. It says .925 and nothing else: not who made it, not when. What the lion passant means goes through the standard marks properly, including the higher Britannia standard.

3. The assay office mark. Which office tested the metal. A leopard’s head is London, an anchor Birmingham, a castle Edinburgh. The assay office marks covers the offices that are open and the several that closed.

4. The date letter. A single letter in a shield. The letter, the typeface and the shape of the shield together give one year, and the combination is different at every office — which is why a Birmingham table will misdate a London piece. Date letters explains how to use them without that trap.

Read the office mark before the date letter

This is the single most common mistake. The date letter is meaningless on its own: every office ran its own alphabet, in its own fonts, in its own shields. U is a different year in London than in Sheffield, and there is no way to know which table to open until you have identified the office.

So the order that actually works is: standard mark first (is this even silver?), office mark second (whose table do I need?), date letter third, maker last.

What a short set of marks means

Four punches is the full English set. Fewer is worth thinking about:

• Three marks, no date letter. Since 1999 the date letter has been optional in the UK, so a modern piece may legitimately have none.
• Marks that look cut about. A strip of marks let into a piece from somewhere else is a known fraud, called transposed or let-in marks. Breathing on the area sometimes shows a faint outline where the inserted panel was soldered in.
• A bright line of solder crossing a mark. Usually a repair — a handle or a foot replaced. The mark can be perfectly genuine while the part beside it is not original.
• Words rather than punches. “STERLING” or “.925” spelled out is usually American, and American silver carries no compulsory date mark at all.

Reading a worn mark

Most hallmarks that look illegible are not. Take the piece somewhere dim and hold a torch almost flat against the surface, so the light rakes across the punches rather than falling onto them. The raised edges throw shadows and the shapes come back. A phone torch held by someone else, at the shallowest angle you can manage, is usually enough.

Do not polish first. Polishing removes metal, and the metal it removes first is the raised detail inside a punch. An over-polished hallmark is gone permanently, and it takes a good deal of the value with it.

A worked example

Say a caster carries, in a row: AB in a rectangle, a lion passant, a crown, and a U in a shaped shield.

The lion says English sterling. The crown says Sheffield — and, because Sheffield used a crown until 1975, it also says the piece is earlier than that. Only now can you open Sheffield’s date letter table and find which cycle uses that shield with that typeface, which gives the year. AB then goes to the register for a name.

Four punches, four separate questions, answered in the right order.