The Mercury of 3rd May (p. 18 ) records the discovery ‘near Bury St. Edmunds’ of a Saxon brooch made from a gilded silver penny of Edward the Confessor. The coin is particularly interesting because it belongs to the first group of coins to be minted at Bury by the moneyer Morcere, subsequent to Edward’s grant of minting rights to the Abbot.
The coin belongs to the so-called ‘expanding cross’ type, the fifth type to be issued in the course of Edward’s reign. Coin dies and designs were changed frequently in order to minimise the risk of forgery by faked or stolen dies. Edward appointed a moneyer to Abbot Baldwin, who succeeded Leofstan on 16th July 1065; Edward himself died on 5th January 1066 (Eaglen p. 27). However, if a moneyer was granted in 1065, there must have been an earlier grant of minting rights (now lost) so the mint could have been operational earlier in Edward’s reign. Dating the coins is somewhat problematic, therefore.
R. J. Eaglen, in his definitive work The Abbey and Mint of Bury St. Edmunds to 1279, records this coin as 2a (Eaglen p. 217), the second type to be issued from the Bury mint, and it is only the seventh known coin of this type from the Bury mint, from which only 30 (now 31 coins) survive from the reign of Edward the Confessor. The obverse legend reads +EDPER/.D RECX: and the reverse reads +MORCERE ON EDHUN. Apart from the ‘small flan’ type issue of Edward earlier in the year, this is the first reference anywhere to the name of Bury St. Edmunds.
The grant of a moneyer to Baldwin coincides with the first real power given to the Abbey and town of
St. Edmund, which until this time had been the relatively modest curtilage of a monastery and was overshadowed by centres like Sudbury and Thetford. All of this changed in 1043, when Edward the Confessor confiscated the eight and a half hundreds of Thingoe, Lackford, Risbridge, Babergh, Thedwastre, Blackbourn and Cosford from his mother Emma (whose name still survives in the village of Hengrave – originally Hemmegrethe or ‘Emma’s ditches’) and granted them to the Abbey of St. Edmund. This grant gave the Abbot what was effectively plenary royal power over West Suffolk, and became the foundation for the Abbey’s future greatness. As a Norman appointed before the Conquest, Baldwin had no trouble convincing William that he and the Liberty of St. Edmund should be left alone – and in any case, William’s concern was with the old Saxon aristocracy that had gathered around Harold Godwinson, not the French speaking clergy appointed during his cousin’s reign.
The coin is now at the British Museum but the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has expressed an interest in acquiring it – personally I would rather see it in Moyse’s Hall.
