The Moneyers of St. Edmund

Abstract

The independent coinages struck by the Viking invaders in the Danelaw are as enigmatic as they are historically interesting, and none more so than that struck in honour of the royal saint Edmund who was killed during a Danish raid on Suffolk in 869. The event is mentioned without much comment by the West Saxon writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and by the time his first biography was written over a hundred years later by Abbo of Fleury it had gained the accretions of edifying myth, with similarities - indeed, with explicit comparisons - with the passions of Our
Lord and St. Sebastian. During his lifetime, as King of the East Angles, Edmund had been responsible for the last native coinage of his kingdom. In 878 East Anglia came under Danish rule through the partition of the Treaty of Wedmore, and Guthrum, the Danish signatory, struck a coinage there in his baptismal name of Athelstan, which closely imitates that of his godfather king Alfred.