EARLY ANGLO-SAXON COINAGE
Welcome to Tony Abramson’s website dedicated to coinage found in early Anglo-Saxon England.
Tony has added two further notes to the BNS blog:
The Peckham Gold Shilling: a unique addition to the corpus of early Anglo-Saxon gold shillings
Although discovered, by metal detection, just two years ago, at Peckham in Kent, only now has a unique gold coin been validated as part of the early Anglo-Saxon corpus of gold shillings, and
Early Anglo-Saxon Coins - Keeping the Corpus Current
Tony explains how best to keep in touch with the latest findings of early Anglo-Saxon gold and silver coins and Northumbrian stycas.
Tony has studied this early coinage for many years and has organised a series of symposia held at both the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds. These have resulted in the publication of Studies in Early Medieval Coinage.
Tony’s has also published several books on the subject. The first, Sceattas: An Illustrated Guide, proved popular as a means of identifying early pennies. This evolved into the more detailed Sceatta List, which radically re-arranged the series - over 700 types organised into 115 groups.
Anglo-Saxon Counterfeits is an invaluable aid to collectors in this age of burgeoning duplicity, especially on the internet. It not only collates all previous major publications of fakes but includes all the Anglo-Saxon material from both the British Museum and the AH Baldwin “Black Museum”. Moreover, all modern reproductions are arranged by Spink number, including those by Ashmore, Grunal the Moneyer and the makers of so-called ‘museum replicas’, often passed off as genuine on unsuspecting novices. It is available from Spink.
Tony's doctoral thesis Where There's Muck, There's Brass, Coinage in the Northumbrian Landscape and economy, c. 575 - c.867 (University of York, 2016), based its analysis on a digitization of Elizabeth Pirie's corpus of stycas in her seminal Coins of the Kingdom of Northumbria c.700-867 (Galata, 1996) combined with the University of York's database of early medieval portable artefacts, VASLE. The volume and mix of coins and artefacts by location reflects varying levels of regional enterprise. The thesis also reveals Bishop Paulinus as issuer of the later varieties of the York gold shillings (627-33).
For the specialist research, Tony's volume 69 of the British Academy's Sylloge of the Coins of the British Isles was published in 2018 and is also available from Spink. The collection, on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for the last 10 years, was auctioned by Spink, in March and September 2021, setting many records.
In 2022, Tony published a sequel to Sceatta List, Gold Coins of Anglo-Saxon England, which is more comprehensive and far better illustrated than Sutherland's now outdated Anglo-Saxon Gold Coinage (1948), which catalogued the Cronall hoard of 1828.
Tony was President of the Yorkshire Numismatic Society from 2011 to 2019. In November 2017, he received the British Numismatic Society's prestigious Jeffrey North prize for services to numismatics.
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