Where the symbols come from
A UK hallmark is set out in Schedule 2 to the Hallmarking Act 1973. Paragraph 1 lists the assay office marks, paragraph 2 the standard marks, and paragraph 3 the optional pictorial marks. The four UK assay offices’ Hallmarking Guidance Notes (November 2022) describe the result in plain terms: a hallmark has three compulsory symbols, the sponsor’s or maker’s mark, the metal and fineness mark, and the assay office mark. The traditional fineness symbols, the date letter and the Convention marks are optional extras struck alongside them on request.
So the lion passant, the crown and the other symbols on this page are not what makes a hallmark a hallmark. They are optional, and since 1999, when the schedule was rewritten, the compulsory statement of fineness has been the number. The guidance notes record that the date letter also stopped being compulsory in 1999.
The number is the standard mark
Paragraph 2 sets the standard mark for each standard of fineness as “the figures” of that standard. There are seventeen standards: gold 375, 585, 750, 916.6, 990 and 999; silver 800, 925, 958.4 and 999; platinum 850, 900, 950 and 999; and palladium 500, 950 and 999. Two of them are written with a decimal, and the schedule drops it in the mark: 916.6 gold (22 carat) is struck as 916, and 958.4 Britannia silver as 958.
The number alone does not say which metal it is, since 999 appears for all four. The guidance notes explain that the metal is shown by the shape of the surround the number sits in, with a different outline for platinum, gold, palladium and silver. That is why the same 950 can be platinum or palladium, and the shield settles it.
The optional symbols, metal by metal
Gold takes a crown, at every one of its six standards. Because the crown is the same for 375 and 999, it says the metal is gold and nothing about the carat; the number beside it does that.
Silver is the only metal with a choice. Sterling, 925, takes a lion passant: a lion walking, one forepaw raised. Britannia (958.4) and fine silver (999) take “the figure of Britannia or a lion passant”, so a lion passant on its own can stand for any of the three. The 800 standard has no pictorial mark at all.
Platinum 950 and 999 take an orb surmounted by a cross. Platinum 850 and 900 have none. Palladium, added to the schedule from 22 July 2009, takes the head of Pallas Athene at all three of its standards.
Edinburgh’s lion rampant
The schedule carries one regional variation. For an article struck by the Edinburgh Assay Office, every reference to a lion passant is to be read as a lion rampant: a lion standing on its hind legs. A Scottish sterling piece hallmarked today can therefore carry a rearing lion where an English one carries a walking one, and both mean the same standard. Edinburgh’s own assay office mark, under paragraph 1, is a castle; London’s is a leopard’s head, Birmingham’s an anchor and Sheffield’s a rose. The assay office marks page covers those.
Reading a piece with the tool
Start from whichever end you can see. If the number in the shield is legible, pick the metal and the number: the tool shows the figures the schedule sets and the symbol that may accompany them. If only a symbol is clear, pick the symbol and the tool lists every standard that can carry it, which narrows the field without pretending to settle it.
Two results deserve care. A standard with no pictorial mark, such as silver 800, should not carry a lion or a Britannia under the current schedule, so a traditional symbol beside an 800 mark belongs to some other rule or some other piece. And a symbol with no number beside it is not a modern UK hallmark, because the number is the compulsory part.
What this page does not cover
This is the schedule as it stands. British silver and gold marked before 1999 was struck under earlier rules, with sets of marks that changed over the centuries; reading those, and dating a piece by its date letter, is a specialist subject this site deliberately leaves alone, for the reasons given on the assay office marks page. The Convention mark is a separate optional mark recognised across the countries of the International Hallmarking Convention, covered on its own page.
None of these symbols is a valuation. A hallmark records that an assay office tested the article and found it at least the fineness shown. What the metal in it is worth is a melt-value question, and what the piece is worth as an object is a different question again.