The coin collection made by an Irishman, Hugh Howard (1675-1738), sold for his descendant the 5th Earl of Wicklow by the Sotheby firm in May 1874, incorporates what is presumably part or the whole of a mid-tenth century coin hoard in which the coinages of the Anglo-Saxon rulers Eadmund, Eadred and Eadwig were well represented. The present note lists the coins involved, and identifies the places and regions where they are likely to have been struck.
Attention is also drawn to the fact that thirty-eight of the coins concerned were purchased by the dealer James Verity for the Bradford businessman Arthur Briggs, and that at the sale of Briggs’s coin collection in March 1893 a good number of the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon coins in the collection that can be identified as ex Howard were purchased for the collector Charles Montagu Crompton-Roberts. These were to be purchased from Crompton-Roberts years later by the Spink firm, and are to be found listed, without their Howard and Briggs provenances, in the September-October 1920 issue of Spink’s Numismatic Circular.
