---
id: "20260723-0209-do-primary-bank-of"
title: "Do primary Bank of England records confirm the 1694 issue / 1695 counterfeit / 1697 watermarked-paper timeline and the Sutton Courtenay mill?"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
origin: "batch"
promoted_to: ["30-notes/claim-bank-of-england-1695-counterfeiting-date-unconfirmed-1758-rival-account.md (new)","30-notes/claim-bank-of-england-1724-portal-contract-earliest-confirmed-not-1697-sutton-courtenay.md (new)","30-notes/claim-bank-of-england-1697-surviving-note-handwritten-not-watermarked.md (new)","40-entities/entity-henry-portal.md (new hub)","30-notes/claim-bank-of-england-adopted-watermarked-banknote-paper-1697.md (updated, dated addendum, not duplicated)","50-questions/question-verify-bank-of-england-1697-watermark-adoption-primary.md (updated, dated progress log, left open — not answered)"]
not_promoted: ["Archive court-minute manuscripts (G4/3, G4/8), OCR-illegible this session — not a claim (no positive finding); folded into the question's progress log as a documented dead end, not dropped silently.","Further leads (Clapham 1944, Coleman 1958, britishnotes.co.uk 3x-blocked, Bank Underground 2025, 1978 Quarterly Bulletin, Wikipedia Sutton Courtenay article) — genuine unread/unfetched leads, kept as leads in this capture and the question's candidate list, not asserted as claims.","Entity candidates declined per the entity-promotion test: Sutton Courtenay Mill (disputed, unconfirmed at Tier 1-2, could be apocryphal), Rice Watkins (person, Tier 3-4 only), Alexander Merrial (person, single search snippet), John Harold Clapham (person, real and notable but unread this session — no vault content rests on him yet), D.C. Coleman (person, same reasoning), Richard William Vaughan (person, single Tier 3-4 mention, thin), Bank of England Archive court minutes G4/3/G4/8 (a source, not a domain referent), American Banker watermark feature (a source, not a domain referent). Only Henry Portal cleared the bar (Tier 1, recurring, load-bearing) and got a hub."]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-07-23T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "batch research run, 2026-07-23, following up open question [[question-verify-bank-of-england-1697-watermark-adoption-primary]]"
derived_from: []
tags: ["currency","banknotes","watermarks","bank-of-england","anti-counterfeiting","history-of-the-book","source-verification"]
source_url: "https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/1969/the-boe-note-a-short-history.pdf; https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol1/pp453-473; https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/minutes/1600-1700/1694/court-1694-1697-index.pdf; https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/minutes/1600-1700/1697/court-1697-1713-index.pdf; https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/museum/online-collections/blog/our-earliest-bank-of-england-note"
source_author: "Bank of England (Quarterly Bulletin, 1969); Bank of England Archive; Edward Walford (Old and New London, via British History Online); Bank of England Museum"
source_date: "2026-07-23T00:00:00.000Z"
source_tier: "1 (BoE Quarterly Bulletin, BoE Archive minute indexes, BoE Museum blog) / 3-4 (Old and New London / British History Online)"
---


This capture follows up the open question
[[question-verify-bank-of-england-1697-watermark-adoption-primary]], routed from
[[claim-bank-of-england-adopted-watermarked-banknote-paper-1697]] (itself resting on a
Tier-3 American Banker trade feature for the 1695-counterfeit and Sutton-Courtenay-mill
specifics). This session went directly to Bank of England primary material: the Bank's
own 1969 *Quarterly Bulletin* historical article, two Bank of England Archive court-minute
manuscript indexes (catalogue refs G4/3 and G4/8) covering exactly 1694–1697 and
1697–1713, and the Bank Museum's own collections blog.

**Net finding: the primary material located does not confirm the popularized 1695/1697/
Sutton-Courtenay narrative, and on one point (the 1695 counterfeiting date) a specialist
secondary source directly conflicts with it.** The 1694 founding and the general
"forgery-prevention" motive are corroborated; the specific date, the mill name, and the
papermaker's name are not corroborated by any Tier 1–2 source found this session.

## Claim: The Bank of England's own 1969 official history does not corroborate a specific 1695 counterfeiting episode

The Bank of England's *Quarterly Bulletin* article "The Bank of England note: a short
history" (1969, written and published by the Bank itself — Tier 1) gives a detailed
account of the note's earliest years, drawing on Clapham's and Acres's standard
scholarly histories, but mentions forgery only in general, undated terms: "The early
notes were followed by others, introduced for various reasons, not least so that forgery
should be made more difficult." No year is attached to a counterfeiting incident, and no
specific 1695 episode is named. This is a historical/dating claim, so the floor is Tier 1–2;
the Bank's own bulletin clears it but does not contain the claim under test — it is silent
where the American Banker feature is specific.
[unverified-quant — the 1695 date is not corroborated here; see also the conflicting 1758 account below]

## Claim: A named-source secondary history dates the first forged Bank of England note to 1758, not 1695

*Old and New London* (Edward Walford, 1878), digitized by British History Online — a
respected historical digitization project, but a Victorian antiquarian secondary account,
Tier 3–4 — states plainly: "The day on which a forged note was first presented at the Bank
of England forms a remarkable era in its history; and to Richard William Vaughan, a
Stafford linendraper, belongs the melancholy celebrity of having led the van in this new
phase of crime, in the year 1758." This is a specific historical/quantitative claim (a date
and a named individual) from a Tier 3–4 source, so per the sourcing floor it is recorded
here flagged, not as settled fact: `[unverified-quant — needs primary; directly conflicts
with the 1695 counterfeiting date claimed by American Banker]`. The two claims cannot
both describe "the first" forged BoE note; at minimum this shows the 1695 date is
contested rather than settled.

## Claim: The Bank's own account dates its first documented banknote-paper watermark contract to 1724, not 1697, and never names Sutton Courtenay or Rice Watkins

The same 1969 Bank of England bulletin states: "In 1724 the Bank entered into an
agreement with the firm of Henry Portal of Whitchurch in Hampshire for the supply of
bank note paper, a connection which has lasted till the present day." This is presented as
a specific, named event — the Bank's earliest documented paper-supply arrangement in
its own institutional history. The bulletin's bibliography (Clapham 1944, Acres 1931,
Feavearyear 1963, Mackenzie 1953) is the standard scholarly literature on this exact
question, and none of these titles or the bulletin text mention Sutton Courtenay, Rice
Watkins, or a 1697 watermark introduction. This does not prove the 1697/Sutton
Courtenay story is false — a Bank Quarterly Bulletin popular-history article need not
mention every mill contract — but it means no Tier 1 source located this session
corroborates the mill attribution; it remains `[unverified-mechanism — needs primary]`
per sources.md's floor for specific technical/production claims. (Separately,
[[claim-bank-of-england-adopted-watermarked-banknote-paper-1697]] already carries
Tier-2 corroboration via the British Association of Paper Historians for the *general*
1697-watermark date, so that narrower point is not newly in doubt — only the Sutton
Courtenay/Rice Watkins mill attribution specifically remains unconfirmed by any Tier 1–2
source.)

## Claim: The Bank's earliest surviving note (1697) is a handwritten, unwatermarked running-cash note — not evidence of watermarked paper in circulation that year

The 1969 Bulletin's own plate captions describe the Bank's oldest running-cash note
specimen as "Entirely written by hand; signed by Robert Hedges, who was 2nd Cashier;
for £22, with a payment of £5 and a balance of £17" (Tier 1, quoted directly from the
fetched PDF). A Bank of England Museum collections blog post, "Our earliest Bank of
England note" (Tier 1 institutional source, though only retrieved via a search-engine
summary this session after a direct fetch returned HTTP 403 — flagged as a lower-
confidence retrieval than a direct read), dates this same note to 18 June 1697 and
describes it as "one of the earliest known examples of a running cash note." Taken
together with the Bulletin's statement that partly-printed notes came into "regular use"
only "probably... between 1696 and 1699," the Bank's earliest 1697 surviving note is
handwritten, not the printed watermarked-loop-pattern paper described in the American
Banker account. This suggests the "1697" date circulating in trade press may conflate two
distinct things: the earliest surviving note (handwritten, 1697) and a claimed but
unconfirmed watermark-adoption event in the same year.

## Attempted but inconclusive: Bank of England Archive court-minute manuscripts (1694–1713)

Two Bank of England Archive manuscript indexes were located and fetched directly —
"court 1694 1697 index" and "court 1697 1713 index" (catalogue references G4/3 and
G4/8, https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/minutes/1600-1700/), covering
precisely the years in question. These are genuine Tier 1 primary material — the Bank's
own Court of Directors minute books. However, OCR extraction of the scanned handwritten
manuscript produced illegible, garbled text (e.g. "Abbot $c j cs 102%000 fa fb lo Blake onl
of tr os Gp Melb, ad B (32") with no legible occurrence of "watermark," "counterfeit,"
"Sutton," "Watkins," or "paper" recoverable this session. This is a genuine primary
source that could not be read this session due to an extraction/OCR limitation, not
because the record doesn't exist — worth a future attempt with a different OCR pipeline
or manual archive consultation. `[unverified — primary source located but currently
unreadable]`

**Overall assessment of the core question:** partially confirmed, partially contradicted,
partially unconfirmed. The 1694 Bank founding and the general "forgery was a motive for
note redesign" point are solid. The specific 1695 counterfeiting date is contradicted by a
named secondary source that places the first forged-note incident in 1758. The Sutton
Courtenay Mill / Rice Watkins attribution and the specific mechanics of the 1697
watermark are not corroborated by any Tier 1–2 source found this session, despite direct
access to the Bank's own official history and (illegibly) its own archive manuscripts. The
central question is marked `[unverified — could not fully confirm; partially contradicted
by a Tier 3–4 secondary source on the 1695 date]`.

## Further leads

- Clapham, Sir John, *The Bank of England: A History, 1694–1914* (Cambridge UP, 1944) — the standard scholarly Bank history cited in the Bank's own bibliography; not read in full this session (only Google Books metadata seen) — the most promising single lead for resolving the 1695/1697/mill question directly.
- Coleman, D.C., *The British Paper Industry 1495–1860* (Oxford, 1958) — standard economic history of English papermaking, likely to contain the Sutton Courtenay/Rice Watkins episode with primary citations; not accessed this session.
- Pam West "British Notes" watermarks page (https://www.britishnotes.co.uk/news_and_info/watermarks/index.php) — a specialist numismatic site that search snippets attribute the Rice Watkins/Sutton Courtenay/1697 story to (with an added detail: the mould's watermark was "made by Alexander Merrial") — the page returned HTTP 425 "Too Early" on every direct-fetch attempt this session (as in the prior 2026-07-12 audit); worth a retry.
- Bank Underground (the Bank of England's own staff research blog), "War and payment innovation: the adoption of paper currency in Britain" (2025) — Tier 1, confirms 1694 note issuance and gives 1697 circulation figures (~£2m BoE notes, ~£3m Exchequer bills) but contains no mention of watermarks, Sutton Courtenay, or 1695 counterfeiting.
- Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 1978, "BoE notes" (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/1978/boe-notes.pdf) — surfaced in search, not fetched this session.
- Wikipedia's "Sutton Courtenay" article surfaced in search but was not checked directly this session for any mill/papermaking mention.

## Entity candidates

- Sutton Courtenay Mill — concept/place — the disputed mill attribution at the center of this question; still unconfirmed by any Tier 1–2 source.
- Rice Watkins — person — Berkshire papermaker credited (in Tier 3–4 sources only) with introducing the 1697 Bank of England watermark.
- Alexander Merrial — person — named in one search snippet as the actual mould-maker for the 1697 watermark, distinct from Rice Watkins; unverified, worth checking.
- Henry (Henri) Portal — person — took over the Bank's banknote-paper supply contract in 1724; this is the earliest Tier-1-confirmed paper contract in the Bank's own history.
- John Harold Clapham — person — author of the standard scholarly *Bank of England: A History* (1944); unread primary lead.
- D.C. Coleman — person — author of the standard *British Paper Industry 1495–1860* economic history; unread primary lead.
- Richard William Vaughan — person — Stafford linendraper executed in 1758 for forging Bank of England notes; per Old and New London, the first such forgery case — in tension with the 1695 counterfeit claim.
- Bank of England Archive court minutes (G4/3, G4/8) — concept/primary source — genuine primary manuscript record for exactly this period; located but OCR-illegible this session.
- American Banker watermark feature — concept/source — the Tier-3 trade-press article that is the sole origin of the 1695/Sutton-Courtenay narrative now circulating; worth flagging in the vault as a compressed or possibly garbled retelling pending primary confirmation.

## Safety flags

None. All fetched pages (Bank of England official bulletins/archive PDFs, British History
Online, Bank Underground, Bank Museum blog) were straightforward historical/
institutional content with no addressed-to-AI language, override language, claimed
authority, tier self-assignment, file-system instructions, credential requests, or urgency
framing. All PDF extractions reported `tls: "verified"`.