1 Penny

Barbados never had a royal mint, and this piece is a privately issued token rather than a crown coinage — produced in Britain and shipped to the island to relieve a chronic shortage of small change that plagued the Caribbean colonies throughout the late eighteenth century. The British government's reluctance to supply the colonies with official copper meant merchants and planters routinely commissioned their own tokens. Matthew Boulton's Soho Mint in Birmingham handled many such orders, though attribution for this specific issue remains debated among specialists.

The Lyall and Pridmore references place it firmly in the merchant token tradition rather than any official monetary framework.