The Coinage of Burgred of Mercia 852–874
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THE COINAGE OF BURGRED OF MERCIA 852–874 WILLIAM A. MACKAY Introduction IN 874, overwhelmed by the attacks of the Danish invaders’ ‘Great Army’ (micel here), Burgred, king of Mercia since 852, abdicated and departed for Rome and a puppet ruler, Ceolwulf II, was installed in his place. The facts about rest of his twenty-two year reign are sparse but it would seem that in the sixteen year period up to 868 Burgred presided over a revival of Mercian power and maintained a military and dynastic alliance with Wessex. This began shortly after the start of his reign with a successful joint Mercian/Wessex campaign against the Welsh in 853, and was cemented by his marriage to Æthelswith, daughter of king Æthelwulf of Wessex. The situation changed with the arrival of the Danish ‘Great Army’ in East Anglia in 865 and its subsequent conquest of Northumbria in 866.1 Thereafter the Danes appear to have moved around Mercia with little opposition. An early incursion to Nottingham in 868 was confronted without success by a joint Mercian/Wessex force and was bought off by Burgred.2 Mercia could not prevent the Danish ‘Great Army’ reaching the Thames at Reading in 870–71 and a subsequent occupation of London, the principal city of the kingdom, in 871–72. Another payment of tribute was required by the Mercians to persuade the ‘Great Army’ to withdraw northwards and the army is recorded at Torksey in 872–73 and at Repton in 873–74. At this time, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Burgred was ‘driven out’ and went into exile to Rome, where he died shortly afterwards, most probably in 875.3 Burgred’s reign left few documents or artefacts. His coinage is his principal monument and survives in a greater volume than for any other ninth-century Anglo-Saxon ruler south of the Humber. It is also, despite the disruption of the latter part of the reign, the most consistent of any Mercian king, comprising one issue with the obverse always having a bust facing right and a reverse always with the moneyers name between two lines, with five design variations.4 The most common of these variations is an enclosed lunette, and this has led to the coinage being known as the Lunettes coinage. Numismatists have generally dismissed the Lunettes coinage as being outside the main- stream development of the English coinage, being of limited artistic merit, base metal and of Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Adrian Lyons for his contribution to early drafts of this article, notably his perceptive input to devising the obverse typology and latterly his ever helpful feedback on drafts of this paper; Hugh Pagan for detailed comments on the Corpus and generously sharing with me data in his extensive card index of the coins of Burgred; Dr Philip Shaw of Leicester University for his philological assessment and advice on moneyers’ names; Dr Rory Naismith for sharing with me images prepared for his forthcoming SCBI volume of the British Museum ninth-century coins; the staff at the Fitzwilliam Museum, the British Museum, the National Museum of Wales, Worcestershire County Museum, the Royal Mint Museum and the National Museum of Denmark for advice, encouragement and access to their collections; private collectors who kindly allowed details of coins in their collections to be recorded and in some cases photographed; Wioletta Madaj of Numismatic Photo Ltd for her assistance in photographing coins included in the study and creating the plates; and finally my wife and daugh- ter for putting up with Lunettes pennies for over nine years. Any omissions or misinterpretations in this paper lie entirely with the author. 1 For a summary of the events of 865–75, see Stenton 1971. 2 Swanton 2000, 70, 71 [868, A and E]: ‘and the Mercians made peace with the raiding-army.’ 3 Following his deposition Burgred, accompanied by Æthelswith, went to Rome, stopping on the way at the monastery of S. Salvatore in Brescia, in whose Liber Vitae they are recorded, along with five men and three women who wished to be remem- bered in the prayers of the monks (Keynes 1997). The party reached Rome and Burgred appears to have died shortly afterwards. Swanton 2000, 72, 73 [874, A and E]: ‘he went to Rome and settled there, and his body lies in St Mary’s church in the English Quarter.’ Æthelswith may have returned to England and died in 888 in Italy whilst travelling to Rome again, Swanton 2000, 80, 81, 82, 83 [888, A and E]: ‘Earldorman Beocca [and Queen Æthelswith, who was King Alfred’s sister] took the alms of the West Saxons and King Alfred to Rome; and she passed away, and her body lies at Pavia.’ Anglo-Saxon Chronicle A varies from E in that it does not link Æthelswith with Beocca and taking alms to Rome, but does note her death and burial in Pavia. 4 BMC types A–E, North 423–7 and Spink 938–42 respectively. William A. MacKay, ‘The coinage of Burgred of Mercia 852–874’, British Numismatic Journal 85 (2015), 101–237. ISSN 0143–8956. © British Numismatic Society. 102 MACKAY little importance.5 This overlooks two remarkable characteristics of the coinage: its longevity and its adoption as the sole coinage design in use in Southern England from c.866 to 876/77, enabling some form of monetary union between the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex. It might be common and unappealing, but numismatically uninteresting it certainly is not. Despite the relatively large quantity of surviving material it has proved remarkably difficult to create a coherent structure for such a well-surviving and long-lasting coinage. From the mid-nineteenth century the coinage was ordered by moneyers and reverse Lunettes types, A to D6 (the existence of Lunettes E only became known in the late 1950s7). This method of differ- entiation was adopted by Keary in his British Museum Catalogue,8 and used by Heywood in the early twentieth century in a British Numismatic Journal article,9 and it has continued in use until the present day. Some sixty years after Heywood, Pagan, in a landmark paper, sought to address both the classification and the dating of the coinage.10 Based on an analysis of a Corpus of 592 coins, he focussed on the reverse types, hoard evidence and obverse designs. He proposed the existence of two distinctive obverse varieties: Horizontal, H and Vertical, V. This was partially modified by Lyon in one of his series of BNS presidential addresses, in which he proposed three further obverse varieties, B (Berhtwulf), G (Grotesque) and F (Floreate).11 Since then, Pagan has elucidated and commented on this coinage in a number of contexts, including the range of grave finds discovered at Repton in the 1980s,12 and ninth-century coin finds in the Southampton area,13 as well as revisiting the broader issues of the coinage in the wider ninth-century context.14 More recently, the author of this article, in collaboration with Adrian Lyons, proposed a classification and chronology for the coinage of Æthelred I of Wessex (865–71) and the Lunettes Coinage of Alfred the Great (871–99).15 Through an analysis of obverse styles this showed that the Wessex Lunettes coinage could be divided into two groups. One group is a distinctive Wessex style struck from dies most probably cut at Canterbury and the second is a much less numerous Mercian-style group, which has more in common with the obverse designs found on the Mercian Lunettes coinage of Burgred, and was most probably struck from dies cut at London or by die-cutters used to working for the Mercian king. The variation in design of the bust noted for the Mercian-style group in the coinages of Æthelred I and Alfred is of considerable assistance in dating the development of Burgred’s Lunettes coinage. Additionally, it was noted that the obverse of the Floreate Cross type of Æthelberht of Wessex (858–65) aligned with that of the Four-Line type of Æthelred I dated to c.865–c.866.16 This reaffirmed the link between these Wessex issues and Lyon’s Burgred Floreate (F) group. This work has provided some firm chronological anchors that can be used in dating components of the Lunettes Coinage of Burgred of Mercia. 5 Ruding 1840, 120, sets a standard for criticism at an early stage in numismatic analysis that is largely sustained thereafter: ‘The long reign of Burgred affords a great variety of coins, together with irrefragable proofs that the art of coinage had then sunk to the lowest state of barbarism, not only in point of execution, but also in the baseness of the standard, for some of them are of an extremely coarse alloy.’ Brooke 1932, 24, dismissed the coinage of Burgred with a Wessex-centric flourish as ‘all Lunettes type, which was introduced by Æthelberht. There is no coinage of Burgred prior to the year 866.’ 6 Lindsay 1842, 40. 7 Blunt 1958–59. 8 Keary 1887 sensibly allocated the letters ‘A’ to ‘D’ to describe the Lunettes types of Burgred, but Grueber, when compiling the second volume of their catalogue (Grueber and Keary 1887) used a different system for Alfred identifying the Lunettes A type as type 1 for Alfred, Lunettes B and type 1 var. a, and so on. Keary also described a small number of coins as ‘barbarous’ (see Eanred: BMC 283–6 and Tatel: BMC 385) but these, whilst of coarse style, are regular coins of the early issues of Burgred’s reign, assigned later in this paper to the Preliminary Lunettes series.