Nytt om runer

A New Runic Coin Type from Norfolk, England

A new Anglo-Saxon runic coin was found in August 1997 at Billockby, some 12 km north-west of Great Yarmouth, near the Norfolk Broads. The finder was John Caruso, an American participant in the annual East of England detecting rally. The coin was auctioned in London, by Spink, on 14 July 1998 (lot 586), and was bought by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, with assistance from the National Art Collections Fund.

Six specimens of the general coin type were known previously, but this seventh is the first to be found with a legend in runes. Of the six, two are unprovenanced and four came from the one site at Coddenham, Suffolk. A slightly later silver coin of related type was found at Caistor-by-Norwich, Norfolk. So such evidence as there is suggests an East Anglian mint.

It is a tremissis, of very pale (i.e. base) gold, diameter 12 mm, weight 1.21 g. On the basis of its fineness and of absence from the Crondall hoard, it is dated c. 670. This, then, is arguably the earliest coinage of East Anglia, flourishing for only a short period c. 660-80, some fifty years before the much larger silver runic coinage in the names of moneyers epa and others, c. 720-50.

The ultimate prototype of the obverse is Imperial Roman: cf. no. 26 in C. H. V. Sutherland, Anglo-Saxon Gold Coinage in the Light of the Crondall Hoard (Oxford, 1948), the only one of this type known at that time; also D. M. Metcalf, Thrymsas and Sceattas in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford (London, 1993-94), vol. 1, 47-49. The obverse has a diademed bust which on this specimen (as distinct from all others recorded so far) faces left: before the head is a cross and below that a strange star-like object with three additions, lines ending in annulets. The reverse, which holds the runes, has at its centre a curious "lyre-shaped object" (Sutherland's words) surmounted by two tau crosses and surrounded by a double circle of pellets. The legend runs round this, retrograde, with traces probably of a roman legend largely off the flan to the right, and a group of runes to the left.

The runic sequence that can be distinguished clearly is l t o e d. After d comes a pair of verticals which seem to be joined by a single, but very faint, line. This pair may represent a single-barred h, though it could be two plain verticals, as on the benu:tigo|| type (Sutherland no. 17). (This section of the legend is indistinct, as though either the coin is worn or its die has not registered precisely.) There follows a cross × that may indicate the end of the text but equally well could be a rune: g or marginally possibly n, and thereafter only a group of pellets. Before l the legend begins to run off the flan. There is the lower half of a vertical, which could be i, and before that the lower parts of letters the first of which seems to be roman V. Nothing can be made of this group.

The coin is presumably to be seen in the context of the few other early Anglo-Saxon runic tremisses. These have sequences of runes that make no obvious sense - that now usually transliterated desaiona is an example - often inserted into a roman inscription. Whether they ever did make sense or not is a question - they may simply have been vernacular attempts to give the effect of legends equivalent to those of roman prototypes. Certainly the sequence here, possibly (i)ltoed(hg), is not encouraging. The pairing of oe does not help, for if this is to represent the reflex of o...i it would better be given by the single rune œ (oeþil). Word separation ?lto ed?? does not help either. So it is perhaps best to leave this uninterpreted until new evidence appears, and to note it simply as a further example of the use of runes on seventh-century coins of east/south-east England.

R. I. Page and Mark Blackburn
University of Cambridge, England

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