Author: BNS Blog Coordinator

A Brief Tour of Medieval Coin Hoards from Britain and Ireland – Part One: 450-1154 AD – Robert Page & William Wilson

In this article we will take you on a quick tour through Britain and Ireland, looking at the distribution of coin hoards by different historic periods, and highlighting selected examples. This article is different to others, in that it provides the reader with many clickable hyperlinks which can be followed to easily learn more about any hoard. Although some links are provided directly in the text, it is possible to access all the hoards for a particular time period by simply clicking on the “map-link” beneath each of the illustrated maps.

The attestation of Edward IV Irish penny portrait “M” at Waterford – Oisín Mac Conamhna

The purpose of this note is to record the attestation of the Edward IV Irish penny portrait “M” at Waterford, on a specimen that has come to the author’s attention recently. The portrait was not noted specifically by Burns 2017 in his foundational work on the series, but is labelled here by extending his portrait classification scheme (which ends with portrait “L”) to the next available letter.

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

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

Medallic Art and Satire in the Glorious Revolution – Alexander Ryland

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. The downfall of James II was a source of ridicule, satirised in visual and material culture through the language of masculinity. One source of this satire can be found in the medallic art of the Glorious Revolution, where a mixture of Williamite propaganda and demand generated by a commercial market for satire resulted in James’s unmanly reputation being struck into the medallic record. The research in this note was kindly funded by a BNS Research Grant.

A Forgotten Coin Auction at Carlisle in 1870 – Hugh Pagan

Although auction sales of coin collections certainly took place in England outside London in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, the evidence for them is patchy. The present note records such a sale which took place in Carlisle in 1870. Unusually, a contemporary newspaper report of the sale both reports the results and names the buyers of the lots that contained coins ranging in date from Celtic times to the reign of William and Mary. The buyers involved included the London coin dealer Julius Jessop and the Yorkshire coin dealer W.H.Eggleston, from Dewsbury, and the latter turns out to have been the original employer and coin dealing partner of the better known dealer James Verity.

Facts concerning the Origin of the Troy Weight Standard – Robert Tye

A Troy pennyweight of 24 Troy grains historically derived from the half of an Islamic pre-existing bullion dirhem of 48 grains.  Developing that study of weight standards by a further study of coin weight, Skinner (1967) judged the derivation beyond doubt, after showing the early post reform Arabic dirhem “set the standard for the English Penny Sterling” (i.e. that the 22.5 grain sterling penny is intentionally a half of the 45 grain dirhem), which therefore “had a direct effect upon later English standards”.