On Saturday I took the opportunity to visit the coin collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge – it took me a while to find it but I eventually located it in the tenebrous Mediaeval and Renaissance Art gallery. I was expecting to be disappointed – after all, coins don’t make good museum exhibits and they’re not fashionable either, but I was pleasantly surprised how many the museum has on display. There is the best collection of Saxon coins minted at Grantebryg, as one might expect, such as this one of Aethelred II, and there are some impressive gold coins – the famous Double Leopard of Edward III, one of the first large flan gold coins minted, which is on the front cover of Spink’s Coins of England and the United Kingdom for 2007. Also celebrated is the gold penny of Henry III, the first gold coin minted since the 7th century; and there is a curious piece of gold stamped faintly with the die of a penny of John, but not for circulation. Curios like this tend to come from Phillip Grierson’s collection – such as two remarkable lead coin trials (one Saxon and one early Mediaeval) from the Thetford mint. I got to see Grierson’s video collection when I was at college but never his coins – after all, a student can scarcely pursue numismatics as a hobby and I had abandoned all hope of taking it up again!
The piece that interested me most was a base-gold (it looked like silver) ‘thrymsa‘ minted in East Anglia around 650 – earlier than what I had always assumed to be the first currency of the kingdom, the runic sceattas of 705-750.
