Beschreibung:

BRITISH COINS, Archbishops of Canterbury, Jænberht (765-792), Penny, without title of Offa, c. 775-9, cross, ienberht, rev. + p +onti+ fex in three lines, 1.22g/5h (EMC 2016.0241, this coin; Chick 149; Blunt –; N 223A; S 881A). Neatly struck on a round flan, nearly extremely fine, UNIQUE to commerce £10,000-12,000 Footnote Provenance: Found at Sheldwich (Kent) September 2016. The only other known specimen, from the Aiskew (North Yorkshire) Hoard, August 1993, is in the Yorkshire Museum. Jænberht, abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, was named as Archbishop of Canterbury in 765. In the 760s and 770s Kent was still able to assert its position as an independent kingdom and had its own kings, with Heaberht recorded from c. 765 and Ecgberht II a little later, between 775 and 779. Kent’s independence at this time was increasingly threatened by Offa, king of the large and powerful Mercian kingdom, who sought to extend Mercian hegemony over East Anglia and Wessex as well as Kent. This led to the inhabitants of Kent fighting Offa at the battle of Otford in 776, after which Offa and Ecgberht II reached some kind of workable relationship until c. 780. This appears to have broken down as Offa and the Mercians asserted overlordship of Kent in full after c. 780. There was no king of Kent until after the death of Offa when Eadberht Praen was made king in 796 and ruled for two years before his reign was brutally terminated by Offa’s successors. It was against this background that Jænberht was Archbishop of Canterbury and inevitably he had an uneasy relationship with Offa. Until 1993 all known coins naming Archbishop Jænberht also named the Mercian king Offa (see Chick types 150-9). In that year a coin was found at Aiskew in North Yorkshire, along with other pennies of Offa, Bishop Eadberht of London and Queen Cynethryth. This new type, at the time unique, named Jænberht on the obverse and stated his title ‘Pontifex,’ meaning Bishop, on the reverse. The new Jænberht ‘Pontifex’ type was dated to between 775 and 779 after the battle of Otford, at a time when Offa was unable to assert his overlordship of Kent which was ruled by its own king, Ecgberht II. The coins naming both Jænberht and Offa are dated to after 780, when Offa asserted overlordship, making the ‘Pontifex’ type the earliest issue of Jænberht and the first to name an Archbishop of Canterbury. Stylistically the Jænberht ‘Pontifex’ penny is without doubt linked to the coins of Ecgberht II which have the same large and neatly executed lettering. This new coin, struck from different dies to the Aiskew example, has the same letter forms for b, h and e on the obverse as those on pennies struck for Ecgberht II by Eoba (Chick type 86). This makes these and the ‘Pontifex’ pence contemporaneous and parallel production with dies cut by the same hand at the time when Offa did not have access to the Canterbury mint. A date of 775-9 is therefore appropriate for the issue of this coin. The Anglo-Saxon coinage in the third quarter of the eighth-century underwent a period of profound change as the broad flan penny replaced the small flan ‘sceatta’ which had been in use from c. 680. By 760 the sceatta coinage had ceased to be struck in much of England south of the Humber. The first moves towards something that would replace it are dated to the 750s with the East Anglian issues of Beonna and Aethelberht I adopting a larger flan – similar to that introduced by Pepin the Short in Francia – than the sceatta. These for the first time named the king on one side and a moneyer on the other. Referred to by numismatists as ‘proto-pence’ these were replaced in the 760s by the earliest issues of the broad flan penny which would form the standard English coin for the next five hundred years. The Jaenberht ‘Pontifex’ type belongs to this group of coins. The earliest issue of the broad flan penny include pence naming Offa struck in East Anglia (Chick 160, moneyer Wilred, also known for Beonna) and London (C