The Coenwulf mancus (and others) visits Bedford

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Today I visited the Bedford Museum, where an exhibition of artefacts from Saxon East Mercia is in full swing; the highlight being the Coenwulf mancus, acquired by the British Museum for an extortionate sum (in the region of £600,000 if I remember correctly) last year. However, I was surprised to see other Saxon gold coins on display - in fact, I suspect that nearly all of the known gold coins were in the cabinet; the Offa dinar struck in imitation of Abbasid models and a mancus of Edward the Confessor I had not even heard of, as well as examples of the Roman coins that furnished the prototypes.

Whoever runs the Bedford Museum is clearly obsessed with numismatics; there were numerous other Saxon coins on display in the exhibition, for no apparent reason, and upstairs there were no less than three cabinets devoted to coins - justifiable, perhaps, in light of Bedford’s importance as a pre-Conquest mint. The interesting new ‘mosaic’ map of the old town on the grass beneath the castle mound has a little figure of a moneyer striking coins, and the Bedford Museum’s obsession stretches to an ‘interactive mint’ with reproduction dies, the idea being that children (why not adults?) can strike their own coins. Upstairs in the museum a microscope of sorts has been fixed to a movable arms and connected to video monitors; as the visitor moves the microscope over the coin tray the coin appears on the monitor - a brilliant idea that I have never encountered before. Another brilliant idea was to have mirrors positioned behind the unique Coenwulf coin so that the reverse is visible. A numismatic feast!

The photograph of the mancus was taken by me, since photography was permitted in the exhibition.

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Filed under antiquarianism, numismatics