Castle (Edinburgh hallmark)

How to read it

The UK’s Hallmarking Act lists a castle as the mark of the Edinburgh assay office. Edinburgh also marks sterling silver differently: where the other offices strike a lion passant, the Act has Edinburgh strike a lion rampant. The Edinburgh Assay Office, the trading name of the Incorporation of Goldsmiths of the City of Edinburgh, dates the first use of its three-towered castle mark to 1485, and the oldest surviving Scottish Act of Parliament referring to hallmarking to 1457. Chaffers’s list of the marks required in Scotland in his day includes the castle as the mark of the assay town.

Also searched as: castle hallmark, Edinburgh assay office mark.

A lion rampant, not a lion passant

On sterling silver, the optional picture mark at Edinburgh is a lion standing on its hind legs; the Hallmarking Act says that for articles struck by the Edinburgh Assay Office, its references to a lion passant are to be read as a lion rampant. The same substitution applies on Britannia silver and 999 silver.

Before the lion: the thistle

From 1759, Edinburgh’s standard mark was a thistle. Chaffers found the first mention of the thistle in the books of the Edinburgh Goldsmiths’ Company in 1759, where it replaced the assay master’s initials. The Silver Society gives the thistle as Edinburgh’s mark for sterling silver, beside Glasgow’s lion rampant and Dublin’s crowned harp. Today’s schedule to the Act gives Edinburgh the lion rampant instead.

Scottish marks a century ago

Chaffers lists five marks for standard gold in Scotland: the quality in karats (22 or 18), the thistle for Edinburgh or the lion rampant for Glasgow, the mark of the assay town (castle for Edinburgh; tree, fish and bell for Glasgow), the date letter and the maker’s mark. He records that a Scottish Act of 1836 prohibited the sale of newly made plate in Scotland unless it had been assayed and stamped at Edinburgh or Glasgow; before that, silversmiths in towns such as Aberdeen, Perth and Dundee struck their own marks.

Other castles

Newcastle used castles too. The Silver Society illustrates a set of marks struck at Newcastle in 1860 or 1861, with the town mark of three castles of the Newcastle Assay Office, which closed in 1884. Edinburgh’s castle has three towers on a single mark; Newcastle’s mark shows three separate castles, and on Newcastle silver it comes with the leopard’s head and lion passant of the English offices.

Who runs the Edinburgh office

The Edinburgh office is run by the Incorporation of Goldsmiths, which the office says was established by the 1457 Act and received a Royal Charter from King James VII in 1687. Chaffers prints the 1687 charter, which gave the deacon and masters power to inquire into gold and silver work made anywhere in the kingdom.

Edinburgh in the modern hallmark

The castle is the compulsory assay office mark in an Edinburgh hallmark, struck with the sponsor’s mark and the fineness mark. Since the 1973 Act all four offices have used the same date letters, changing on 1 January, according to Birmingham Assay Office’s timeline.

A thistle on Glasgow silver

Chaffers notes that the Glasgow Assay Office had used the thistle as an additional optional mark since 1914, on silver and on gold of 18 and 22 karats.

Britannia and 18 carat in Scotland

The 1836 Scottish Act that Chaffers quotes also provided for the higher silver standard and for 18-carat gold: silver of 11 ounces 10 pennyweights was to be marked with the figure of Britannia in addition to the other marks, and gold of 18 karats with the figures 18.