How do I find the year from a silver date letter?

Identify the assay office mark first, then look the letter up in that office's own table. Match three things rather than one: the letter itself, the typeface it is cut in, and the shape of the shield around it. Each office reused the alphabet every twenty-odd years and changed the font and shield each cycle, so the combination gives one year while the letter alone gives about a dozen.

Why do two pieces with the same letter have different dates?

Because each assay office ran its own independent cycle until 1975. The letter U in London and the letter U in Sheffield are different years, in different typefaces, in different shields. Using a London table on a Birmingham piece is the most common dating error there is, and the answer it gives looks entirely convincing.

When does the date letter change each year?

Today it changes on 1 January. Historically it did not — each office changed its letter on its own day, so a piece assayed in the spring can carry what looks like the previous year's letter. For most purposes this does not matter; it matters if you are tying an object to a documented event within a particular year.

What do the letters I and J mean on silver date letters?

Most cycles omit one of them, along with letters that are easily confused in a small punch. That is why a cycle is usually twenty or twenty-five letters rather than twenty-six, and why counting forwards from A will not give you the right year. Always match against the printed table rather than counting.

Can a date letter be faked?

The marks themselves are difficult to fake convincingly, but they can be moved. Marks cut from a damaged piece and let into another — transposed or let-in marks — are a known fraud, and the tell is usually a faint seam around the marked panel, sometimes visible when you breathe on it. A date letter that does not fit the object's style is worth a second look.

Silver date letters: how to read the year

Q: Does every piece of British silver have a date letter?

Not any more. The date letter became a voluntary mark in the UK in 1999, so modern pieces may not carry one — although London still applies it as standard unless a customer asks otherwise. Older British silver normally does have one, and its absence on a piece presented as Georgian is worth asking about.

Almost nothing else in the antiques world will give you a single year. A furniture style gives you thirty. A pottery backstamp gives you a range. A British silver date letter, read properly, gives you one.

It has been doing so since 1478, when a letter was added to identify the warden responsible for that year’s assay, and it has changed every year since.

What a silver date letter is

A single letter of the alphabet, struck in a shaped shield, recording the year in which the piece was tested.

Not the year it was made, strictly — the year it was assayed. In practice those are usually the same year or one apart, because a maker sent work for assay before selling it, but the distinction matters for a piece finished long after its metal was tested.

The letter is the smallest punch in the row and the one most often worn flat, because it is shallow and because it is the one people rub at.

Three things to match, not one

The letter alone is worthless. There are only twenty-odd of them and six centuries to cover.

Every assay office cycled through the alphabet again and again, and changed two other things each time round:

The letter.
The typeface it is cut in — roman, italic, black letter, upper or lower case.
The shape of the shield around it — a plain square, a shield with a pointed base, a cartouche with clipped corners.

Together those three narrow to one year. Any one of them alone does not:

What you are matching	On its own it gives you	Why
The letter	About a dozen candidate years	Twenty-odd letters, six centuries of cycles
The typeface	A handful of cycles	Roman, italic and black letter each ran for decades
The shield shape	A handful of cycles, at one office	Shields were reused, and differ between offices
All three, at the right office	One year	Which is the whole point of the system

This is why hallmark tables are printed as pictures rather than as lists. You are matching a shape, not looking up a character, and a table that gives you letters without their shields is not a table you can use.

It is also why counting will not work. Most cycles omit letters — commonly J, sometimes I, and others that are hard to distinguish in a punch a millimetre across — so a cycle can be twenty or twenty-five letters rather than twenty-six. Counting forwards from A gives an answer that is wrong by a year or three, which is worse than no answer because it looks right.

Find the assay office before the date letter

Before 1975 each assay office ran its own cycle, its own fonts and its own shields, independently of the others. From 1975 they adopted a common system.

The consequence is blunt: a date letter cannot be read until you know which office struck it.

Reading a Birmingham U off a London table will give you a confident, precise and wrong answer, and nothing about the result will look wrong. This is the most common mistake made with British hallmarks, and it is made by people who are being careful — because the table did not tell them they had the wrong table.

So the order is: standard mark, then office mark, then date letter. The assay office marks is how to identify the second one, and how to read a British silver hallmark walks the whole sequence.

When the date letter changes

Today it changes on 1 January.

Historically it did not. Each office changed its letter on its own day in the year — London’s was traditionally in May — which is why a piece assayed in the spring of a given year can carry what a modern reader would take for the previous year’s letter.

For most purposes this does not matter. It matters if you are trying to tie an object to a documented event within a particular year, in which case the change date for that office in that period is worth checking rather than assuming.

Since 1999 the date letter is optional

The date letter became a voluntary part of the UK hallmark in 1999.

London still applies it as standard unless a customer asks otherwise, but a modern piece assayed elsewhere may legitimately have three marks and no letter.

A missing date letter on an obviously recent object is not a warning sign. A missing one on a piece presented as Georgian is a question worth asking out loud.

What to do with a date letter you cannot match

Rake the light across it rather than shining it straight on. Hold a torch almost flat to the surface so the punch edges throw shadows. The shield shape usually reappears before the letter does, and the shield alone narrows the cycle.
Photograph it and enlarge the photograph. A phone at its closest focus, then pinched to zoom, beats squinting — and it lets you hold the image beside a table.
Check you have not got an import mark. Silver assayed in Britain after 1904 for import carries the office mark in an oval and the standard as a decimal figure. The whole set reads differently from a domestic one.
Check the lid separately. On a lidded piece the lid is usually marked in its own right, and a lid whose letter disagrees with the body is a marriage of two objects rather than a puzzle.
Ask the office. For London marks struck before 1975 the Goldsmiths’ Company Library handles historic identification, and the Assay Office handles more recent ones. That is a real service run by the people who keep the registers, and it is the answer when a table will not settle it.

What a date letter does not tell you

It gives the year of assay. It says nothing about the maker, nothing about where the piece was made, and nothing at all about what it is worth.

Two pieces assayed in the same office in the same year can be an order of magnitude apart in value, because value comes from form, weight, maker, condition and what the market recently paid — not from the year. What an auction result actually says is about reading that last one properly.