Between 1644 and 1672, England halted the production of its lowest denomination coins, prompting ordinary individuals and communities to create coins to address the shortage of small change. A large twentieth-century collection that includes over 13,000 such surviving tokens has largely been overlooked by historians and economists, despite the tokens’ significance. In this source and others are a total of over 9,000 types of tokens, originating mainly from the City of London, thirty-seven English counties, and the Irish Pale. Catalogued in an eight-volume Sylloge , published over thirty years, the tokens offer valuable insights into England’s history and societal dynamics during a tumultuous period that included two major regime changes, plague, and London’s Great Fire.

Coins have provided specific and concrete markers of official, legitimate political sovereignty since the time of the Roman Empire. Europe's female monarchs of the old regime, a group that has not been much studied, used numismatics in effective ways to enhance their official sovereignty. Throughout the entire period, most royal heiresses were married, and despite a persistent and widely circulated literature that preached wifely subservience, their coins (and, later, their medals) suggest their full political autonomy.

Since the seminal study of English witchcraft c. 1970, such developments as England's entry into the European Community and the revival of witchhunting episodes in postcolonial Africa have blurred parts of the picture. Recent publications present an opportunity to make revisions to the classic view of British witchcraft, setting the subject within its proper European context while pointing out some of its distinctive features.