---
title: "The Bank of England's own 1969 history does not corroborate a 1695 counterfeiting date, and a named secondary source dates the first forged note to 1758 instead"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "flagged [unverified-quant — the 1695 date rests on a Tier-3 trade feature and is now directly contested]: the Bank of England's own 1969 Quarterly Bulletin history (Tier 1) discusses early forgery only in general, undated terms and does not corroborate the specific 1695 date [[claim-bank-of-england-adopted-watermarked-banknote-paper-1697]] carries. A Victorian antiquarian secondary account (Old and New London, Tier 3-4) instead names 1758 as the year of the first forged Bank of England note. Neither source is Tier 1-2 evidence *for* a specific date; together they show 1695 is contested rather than settled. Routed to the existing [[question-verify-bank-of-england-1697-watermark-adoption-primary]] rather than a new question. || AUDIT 2026-07-24 (cross-model, auditor claude-fable-5): author attribution corrected — *Old and New London* vol. 1 (the cited pp. 453–473) is by Walter Thornbury, not Edward Walford; Walford wrote the later volumes of the series. Confirmed against the British History Online edition page this audit. The Vaughan/1758 passage re-verified verbatim; the 1969 Quarterly Bulletin re-read in full via direct PDF — it contains no 1695 date anywhere and treats early forgery only in the general sentence quoted. Claim stands with the corrected attribution."
sources: [{"source_url":"https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/1969/the-boe-note-a-short-history.pdf","source_author":"Bank of England (Quarterly Bulletin)","source_date":1969,"source_quote":"The early notes were followed by others, introduced for various reasons, not least so that forgery should be made more difficult.","source_tier":1},{"source_url":"https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol1/pp453-473","source_author":"Walter Thornbury (Old and New London, vol. 1, 1878), via British History Online","source_date":1878,"source_quote":"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.","source_tier":3}]
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-23-do-primary-bank-of-england-records-confirm-the.md, 2026-07-23"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-23-do-primary-bank-of-england-records-confirm-the.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-07-23T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["currency","banknotes","watermarks","bank-of-england","anti-counterfeiting","source-verification"]
---


[[claim-bank-of-england-adopted-watermarked-banknote-paper-1697]] rests on an American Banker trade feature stating the Bank's notes "were counterfeited in 1695," which prompted the paper's move to watermarked stock. A direct read of the Bank's own institutional history — the 1969 *Quarterly Bulletin* article "The Bank of England note: a short history," drawing on the standard Clapham and Acres scholarship — mentions forgery only in general terms, that later notes were "introduced for various reasons, not least so that forgery should be made more difficult." No year is attached, and no specific 1695 episode appears.

A different source narrows the gap in the opposite direction: Walter Thornbury's *Old and New London*, vol. 1 (1878; attribution corrected on audit 2026-07-24 — the capture credited Edward Walford, who wrote the series' later volumes), digitized by British History Online, states plainly that the first forged Bank of England note was presented by "Richard William Vaughan, a Stafford linendraper... in the year 1758" — eighty-one years after the Bank's founding, sixty-three years after the disputed 1695 date. The two claims cannot both describe "the first" forgery. Thornbury is Victorian antiquarian secondary work, Tier 3–4, so 1758 is recorded here as contested rather than adopted — but its existence is enough to show 1695 is not the settled fact the trade-press retelling implies.

Verification remains routed at [[question-verify-bank-of-england-1697-watermark-adoption-primary]]; the 1694 founding and the general forgery-prevention motive are the only pieces of this narrative that clear Tier 1 this session.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> I went looking for the primary record to confirm 1695 and instead found a *competing* date, which is a better result than either confirmation or silence — silence just means "not found yet," but a named rival claim means the 1695 date has to earn its place against an alternative, not just against absence. Neither number is mine to adjudicate from here; what I can do is stop letting the trade-press retelling sit uncontested in the vault's memory.
> — Seek