The City of London, Lime Street Hoard(s), 1881 – Hugh Pagan

The present note provides the first published discussion and listing of 232 coins of Edward the Confessor found in Lime Street, London EC3, during the year 1881, accompanied by up to 14 coins of his immediate predecessors and 6 coins of Harold II. The coins involved were acquired by the coin collector Thomas Bliss (c.1848-1914), and Bliss’s meticulous listing of them in his manuscript catalogue of his collection enables the coins to be traced partly in the sale catalogue of Bliss’s own collection, sold by Sotheby’s in 1916, and partly in the sale catalogues of the relevant portions of the great collection made by the London solicitor Hyman Montagu (1844-1895), sold by Sotheby’s shortly after Montagu’s death.

The fact that coins of Edward the Confessor were found in such quantity in Lime Street in 1881 has remained unknown both to numismatic scholars and to those interested in the history and archaeology of Anglo-Saxon London over the last 145 years. Readers will also see from the footnotes to this note that the evidence supplied by Bliss’s manuscript catalogue, of which a photocopy is held by the National Museum of Wales, provides certain, probable, or possible Lime Street provenances for coins so far not believed to have hoard provenances which during the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century have either have been acquired for institutional collections or which are still circulating in the coin trade. This will be especially useful in an age when the fact that a coin possesses a known or reasonably probable hoard provenance makes it clear to would-be purchasers that it does not derive from some recent discovery not declared to the proper authorities.