Thomas Spence's political halfpennies occupy a singular place among the Conder token series, less commercial issue than pocket-sized manifesto, and this piece, struck in 1794 at the height of his notoriety, captures him at his most defiant. Spence was a self-taught radical from Newcastle who settled in London's High Holborn, where he ran a book-stall and later a shop he called the "Hive of Liberty," selling pamphlets, his weekly Pig's Meat, or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, and the very tokens he had cut to spread his doctrine of land nationalization. In May of 1794 he was swept up with other members of the London Corresponding Society and held in Newgate on a charge of high treason, a charge that never produced a conviction but kept him confined for seven months. Rather than shrink from the episode, Spence commemorated it directly on his coinage, and the obverse here does exactly that: his own bust in profile facing left, ringed by the pointed legend T. SPENCE 7 MONTHS IMPRISON'D FOR HIGH TREASON, with the date 1794 below and, in a detail collectors of the series prize, the numeral 4 deliberately cut in retrograde, evidently a quirk or private joke of engraver Charles James, who cut nearly all of Spence's dies. The reverse turns from grievance to aspiration. Beneath a spreading tree, three men dance a jig while a fourth sits at table enjoying a full meal, an image of ease and plenty captioned AFTER THE REVOLUTION, Spence's vision of the abundance that would follow the abolition of private landholding, and one he paired elsewhere in the series with a starving, shackled prisoner captioned "Before the Revolution" for maximum contrast. The edge carries a more prosaic but no less telling inscription, SPENCE DEALER IN COINS LONDON, doubling as an advertisement for the very shop from which the token was sold.