A New Coin of the Kentish Rebel Eadbearht Preen

A NEW COIN OF THE KENTISH REBEL EADBEARHT PRiEN By R. H. M. DOLLEY, F.S.A. (Department of Coins and Medals, British Museum) A RECENT paper in the British Numismatic Journal has described at some length the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon sUver penny from the end of the eighth century which is of no httle significance for the student of Kentish affahs.1 In a purely numismatic pubhcation, however, it was not possible more than to hint at wider issues, and the purpose of the present note is to suggest to the non-numismatist why it is that the new piece has proved to be of such compelling interest for specialists in a field less and less ignored by the historian proper. Pubhcation in this form, too, wiU provide a convenient opportunity for indicating where a new school of Anglo-Saxon numismatists would seek to modify, often in quite important respects, the picture of the first Kentish coinage that appears in the late Dr. G. C. Brooke's masterpiece, English Coins, stiU after more than a quarter of a century the fundamental textbook for all concerned with the discipline. One may also express the hope that enlarged dhect photographs of the coin in question (PL I ) will give the non-numismatist a vivid impression of the technical skills of the Canterbury school of die-engravers. One does not have to subscribe to the out-moded view that after Offa the art of making beautiful coins was lost, to recognize that Kent played a decisive role in the formation of a tradition of vhtuosity maintained long after the business of die-cutting had been transferred to London. The diameter of the coin is only shghtly more than that of the modern shUling, and the thickness considerably less, but the standards of design and of execution bear witness to the craftsmanship of the Canterbury engraver who forged steel punches only a few millimetres long, combined them into an exquisite pattern on the face of a soft hon die, and then succeeded in hardening the latter without distortion of the intricate design. Of the Saxon silver penny it may truly be said that : Cantia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes Intuht agrestis . . . and, as we shall see, the new coin provides new and conclusive evidence of the extent to which Offa relied on the moneyers of Canterbury when i B.N.J., XXVHI, ii (1956), pp. 243-8. 162 PLATE I Coin of Eadbearht Praen. (Enlarged 3 X ) [fact p. 162 A NEW COIN OP THE KENTISH REBEL EADBEARHT PR^EN it came to striking the first essay at a national Enghsh coinage. Recent research by Mr. C. E. Blunt has estabhshed that the earhest Enghsh versions of the novus denarius of the Carolingians were struck for the Kentish kings Heaberht and Ecgberht, and this important paper has since been vindicated by the emergence of two quite unpubhshed pence of the latter, one in a private coUection and one in the Vatican Cabinet.1 If a consequence of this is that the very rare early pence which Brooke attributed to iEthelberht I I must now be given to iEthelberht of East Anglia, Kentish patriots can find ample consolation in Mr. Philip Grierson's 1957 Ford Lectures which stress the Kentish contribution to the ephemeral Anglo-Saxon gold coinage of the late seventh century. In particular one may draw attention to the prominence Mr. Grierson accords to the Kentish origins of Eorcenwald to whom are now attributed the London thrymsas which in the past have been given, albeit on quite insufficient grounds and against the numismatic evidence, to his predecessor MeUitus.2 There are known today precisely eleven coins of a King Eadbearht, four being in the National Collection, one apiece in the University Collections at Cambridge, Glasgow and Oxford, and four, including the coin which is the subject of this note, in as many private coUections. One coin is a single find from near Sandwich, and another a single find from near Norwich. A thhd occurred in a major hoard of the late nineteenth century from the Middle Temple, and two more are from the Delgany find from Ireland, an important mid-nineteenth century hoard which there is reason to associate with the Viking attack on Kent in 835, whUe a sixth is believed to have been purchased in Copenhagen, though a Maidstone provenance has been claimed for it. The newly discovered coin was acquired in the neighbourhood of Letchworth and in all probabihty was found locaUy, and an eighth coin may be presumed to be from an East Anglian find. The provenances of the remaining three coins are discreetly veUed by the mists of the eighteenth century, but it is interesting to note that no coin of King Eadbearht was known to Speed, or Walker, or even to Eountaine. The eleven coins are from ten pahs of dies, and bear the names of five moneyers, Babba, Ethelmod, Ethelnoth, Iaenberht and Tidheah. From this it may be inferred that Eadbearht's coinage was on a not insignificant scale, but the coins themselves are sUent as to his kingdom and to the place of theh minting. The fact that two occurred in the Delgany hoard, however, puts them before 835, and aheady a date much earlier than that was clearly indicated by theh style and fabric. There are five distinct varieties of design, and each is exactly paraUeled 1 B.N.J., XXVII, i (1952), pp. 52-4. 2 Cf. C. H. V. Sutherland, Anglo-Saxon Gold in relation to the Crondall Find, Oxford, 1948, pp. 41-5 ; C. E. Blunt, B.N.J., XXV, iii (1948), pp. 343-5, etc. 163 A NEW COIN OP THE KENTISH REBEL EADBEARHT PR^EN on late coins of Offa, whUe three of the five moneyers concerned also struck for the Mercian king. ProsopographicaUy and typologicaUy, therefore, the coins in question belong to the last five years or so of the eighth century, and from the time of Taylor Combe onwards they have been associated with a certain Eadbearht " fam was oJ>er noma nemned Prsen," a one-time cleric who led a Kentish revolt after the death of Offa in 796 which was not finaUy put down untU Coenwulf mounted a fuU-scale invasion of Kent in 798. The correctness of this attribution now seems estabhshed beyond aU question, as examination of the new penny has shown that it bears the imprint of a reverse die which had actuaUy been used to strike coins for Offa. No less important is the new hght thrown by this critical die-link on the coinage of Offa himself. In the first place there is not the least reason to suppose that the Kentish rebels were ever in possession of London. Yet the evidence of the die-link is that they had occupied Offa's major mint, and corroboration comes from the fact that three of Eadbearht's moneyers had struck for Offa while the types of the rebel coins are indistinguishable from those of the Mercian coinage which they succeeded. The presumption must be that Offa had relied on Canterbury for the bulk of his coinage, and this traditional picture fits in weU with what we know of the pre-eminence of the Canterbury mint in later times. If a new. generation of Anglo-Saxon numismatists cannot accept Brooke's intercalation of an Eadwald in the Kentish dynasty, and reverts to Haigh's century-old attribution of coins with his name to an East Anglian counterpart of Eadbearht otherwise unknown to history, at least it more than redresses the balance by giving to Canterbury a number of coins of JLthelwulf of Wessex hitherto associated with the very minor mint of Winchester.1 Nor should we forget that iEthelwulf 's possession of Kent enabled him to deny iEthelbald all rights of coinage,2 whhe the decline of Mercia is well exemplified by the absence of coins in the name of Burgred struck prior to his marriage into the West Saxon royal house which from Ellandune onwards effectively controlled Canterbury. A second consequence of the new die-link between coins of Offa and of Eadbearht Prsen is that we can at last be absolutely confident which are Offa's last types. The picture that now begins to emerge suggests that Offa coined very heavUy during the last few years of his reign, and certainly " over-production " of coin c. 795 would go far to explain apparent interruptions in the flow of pence during the next quarter of a century. Eadbearht was taken prisoner in 798, but the Canterbury mint did not strike on any considerable scale for Coenwulf 1 Brooke, op. cit., pp. 16, 43, etc. 2 Ibid., cf. C. E. Blunt, B.N.J., XXVIII, i (1955), pp. 20-1. 164 A NEW COIN OP THE KENTISH REBEL EADBEARHT PR4EN at least until c. 800. Even then the resumption was comparatively short-lived, and most numismatists would now agree that the coins of Archbishop Wulfred and of the upstart Baldred, which Brooke implies were struck over the whole period from 805 and 807 respectively, in fact are to be dated after rather than before c. 820. Probably, too, we are to move back a few years from c. 825 certain anonymous issues which Brooke was inclined to associate with the confused position that obtained after EUandune. On this telling it would seem that we are to postulate a somewhat unlooked-for economic resurgence of Kent at a time when kingdom and archbishopric seemed at theh lowest ebb, but much more work wUl have to be done before we can be quite certain of the light which the coins throw on the events of the momentous decade which saw the emergence of Wessex as the strongest single power hi England. For the present, however, it may be said with confidence that typologicaUy there is no reason to date any of Wulfred's extant coins earlier than his " reconciliation " with Coenwulf, and the fact that on all these coins the name of the Mercian king is conspicuous by its absence may suggest a date after rather than before EUandune. If Wulfred and the Mercian dynasty came to be at daggers drawn, the wheel had turned full circle since the short-lived usurpation of Eadbearht Prajn. From more than one historical source we may infer that JSthelheard was Offa's nominee to the See of Canterbury, and there is reason to beheve that the Archbishop had had to abandon his cathedral city and take refuge beyond the Thames when the Kentish rebels threw off the Mercian yoke.1 What unfortunately does not emerge from Brooke is the extreme rarity of the coins of iEthelheard struck between the death of Offa and the elevation of Cuthred, Coenwulf's brother, to the throne of Kent c. 801—extant examples, if any, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and stylistically they are closer to the coins of Cuthred than of Offa. The coins, then, seem to confirm the view that the Archbishop was driven from his See, and certainly if iEthelheard had remained in Canterbury it would be curious if Eadbearht had not sought ecclesiastical support—or at least the semblance of recognition—by a joint issue of the type that Offa had tolerated even in the case of that uncompromising Kentish patriot Archbishop Jsenberht. There can be httle doubt, then, but that the revolt of 796 was " anticlerical" in the sense that the rebels expelled an Archbishop whom rightly or wrongly they considered a tool of the Mercians, and it is perhaps noteworthy that the Pope was prepared to excommunicate Eadbearht. The savage mutUation of the rebel king is no less sugges- 1 A letter of Pope Leo I I I may imply that at one time even his life was in danger. 165 A NEW COIN OP THE KENTISH REBEL EADBEARHT PR^EN tive that the rising may have been considered something more than the gesture of a spirited people only recently brought into submission to a new " Bretwalda," but we must be careful not to exaggerate the consequences of faUure. If we examine the coins we find that two of Eadbearht's moneyers who had struck for Offa strike also for Coenwulf after the repression of the revolt. Clearly not aU who were associated with Eadbearht shared his downfah, and it would be interesting to know how they succeeded in compounding what technicaUy at least was high treason in the eyes of the Mercian king. On the other hand these moneyers were not permitted, or so it would seem on the evidence of extant coins, to strike for Cuthred, puppet though he was, whUe Eadbearht's " new " moneyers, i.e. those who had not struck previously for Offa, seem to have been as ephemeral as their creator. Much work remains to be done on the status of the Anglo-Saxon moneyer— and for the present we are not even justified in assuming that the moneyer of c. 800 enjoyed a position analogous to that of his counterpart of c. 1000—but the fact that a moneyer could strike for Offa, Eadbearht and again for Coenwulf is a straw in the wind the significance of which it would be foolish enthely to ignore. AU in aU, then, the new penny of Eadbearht Prsen must rank as one of the more intriguing discoveries in Anglo-Saxon numismatics for a number of years, and it is hoped that the pubhcation of this note may encourage members of the Kent Archseological Society to bring to the notice of specialists any medieval coin that comes their way. The same number of the British Numismatic Journal that contains the account of the penny of Eadbearht also includes a short note on a • Calais heavy quarter-noble of Henry IV recently found at Ashurst, near Tunbridge WeUs.1 All heavy quarter-nobles of Henry IV are rare, and in fact this little gold coin, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge,, is only the thhd example to be recorded from the Calais mint, and the only one with a known find-spot. In the fields of Ancient British and medieval numismatics at least, the single find can be just as important as the hoard, and few counties are as rich in coins as Kent, which over the last seven years has produced for the present writer's inspection rather more rarities than any other comparable area, the Swedish island of Gotland not excepted. 1 B.N.J., XXVIII, ii (1956), p. 416. 166