PREVIEW: COINS FROM THE ROYAL BERKSHIRE COLLECTION 13 OCTOBER

The role of coins as important historical documents is a global phenomenon, partially because the materials they are made from mean they have survived down the centuries when other evidence of past cultures has vanished. Where this role becomes even more important is when those coins relate to periods of great change, as with this collection, which covers the coinage in the Anglo Saxon and early post Conquest years of England.

Among the features to be noted here is the move away from traditional design forms in the eighth century, which reflected pagan and Christian influences as well as harking back to the age of Roman occupation. Instead, coinage was used to underpin royal power, with the obverse carrying the names and portraits of kings. As the catalogue introduction states: “Indeed, it is because of the surviving coins that we understand Cynethryth’s (Offa’s wife) prominent position within Offa’s court (lot 106); that Burgred of Mercia maintained a kingdom of significant power (lot 107); and that Alfred the Great held London throughout the early 880s (lot 111). Further change came under Alfred’s (871-899) grandson Aethelstan of Wessex (924-939), the first king to truly rule greater England. He organised a more controlled network of mints, with the first widespread use of mint-signatures, although that fell away again until the reign of Eadgar (959-975), when standardisation finally emerged, with the king’s portrait and name on the obverse and the moneyer and mint signatures on the reverse. The Royal Berkshire Collection focuses on coinage from the Wallingford mint, established in the ninth century during Alfred’s reign. Despite its importance, especially during the reign of Aethelstan, its output was intermittent because of its distance from sources of the silver needed to strike coins. This adds to the rarity of surviving coinage from the mint. Highlights from the sale include an extremely fine penny from Alfred the Great (estimate £6,000-8,000) with a provenance to notable collections dating back more than a century. A Cynethryth penny of c.785, found near Duxford, Cambridgeshire in 1992 is expected to sell for £2,400-3,000, the same estimate for a crowned bust penny of Aethelstan struck at Wallingford. A Pyramids type penny from the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-66), by the moneyer Beorhtmaer, has an extraordinarily striking portrait of the king. An excessively rare coin because it lacks the sceptre which is usually included, it is pitched at £3,000-3,600. “The care and dedication taken to build a collection that reflects the key changes in coinage across a period of about 400 years when England, as we largely know it today, was establishing itself, is a tribute to scholarship at its finest,” said Noonans’ Head of Coins, Tim Wilkes.