Featured Medieval - A Viking Imitation

Nice one @Egry! The Viking issues of England tend to be out of my price range at the moment (heck, the imitative do as well - I got lucky on this one in the op...)

 

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Nice discussion, @FitzNigel, as always

Here are some Anglo-Viking coins in my collection:


A Viking imitation of Alfred the Great’s famous Londonia monogram penny. Crude and underweight, along with double struck, is highly suggestive of Viking manufacture.


A likely Viking imitation of Edward the Elder’s two line type. Both the king and moneyer’s name are blundered, suggesting Viking imitation, though the coin is in quite good shape, among the highest technical grade for a coin of this era, suggesting possibly a hoard origin.


A more common Viking penny- a St Edmund of East Anglia penny, made in the Danelaw in honor of St. Edmund, who was of course killed by the Danes themselves. This particular coin appeals to me because of the Latin moneyer, with the reverse inscribed “Remigius Me F(ecit)” or ’Remigius made me’. It can be easy to forget that the Vikings were a multicultural society with ties to all parts of Europe and Western Asia. There are examples of English, Frankish, Frisian, German, and Nordic names in the moneyers of these Viking coins.


Probably my favorite Viking coin, a St. Peter of York penny with one-line variant, with blundered legends and symbols on the obverse.
The key is easily discernible below the text, representing St Peters’s keys to the gates of Heaven.
The symbol above is less easy to figure out. It almost looks like a Christmas tree on a stand, but this symbol would not really fit. The leaves look like palm fronds, which is seen in medieval art, but the palm has never been really associated with St. Peter.
The symbols associated with St. Peter include the key(s), rooster, pallium, books, scrolls. This symbol doesn’t look like any of them.
I have a few theories:
1) an upside down cross, one of the symbols of St. Peter (but really not what this looks like)
2) a tree of uncertain significance. Doubtfully Yggdrasil
3) an upside down hammer, possibly Mjolnir. As crazy as it sounds to have a Viking symbol on a Christian coin, the sword-type St. Peter coins that were produced about 20 years later feature this very thing.
4) water flowing from a wall. One of the early Christian miracles associated with St. Peter was that he made water flow from the wall of his prison cell
5) part of a two-part story. To the left of the key is a bow tie-shaped device, similar to what appears on the bottom of the top symbol. Is this a two-part story? The hammer above is coming apart, and the head of it is all that's left underneath, then this leads to the key to Heaven. A religious lesson to abandon the pagan faith?

Any other speculation is of course greatly welcomed. There is only one other example of this particular coin known, and it is in a museum. There are maybe a dozen of the St Peter one-line pennies known, with different configurations and symbols than this one.

 

Those are fantastic examples @Nap! I wouldn’t even know where to start between the Alfred and the single-line St. Peter. Your speculations on the St. Peter coin are all that come to me off the top of my head (unless the ‘tree’ was meant to be some type of Ogham, but as far as I can tell, Ogham doesn’t use curved lines...). Fascinating pieces, regardless. Your contributions always amaze me!

 

Absolutely Freaking Brilliant. ...From here, your eloquent points in the second paragraph are precisely what make the issues of York only more fun than the ones of the Danelaw, to the south. Even at the dynastic level, there was a lot going on between the often rival Norse kings of York and Dublin. Almost an echo of the drama involved in Harald Fairhair's unification of Norway.
At least by comparison (and even then, this is a frank exaggeration), the Danes to the south just kind of sit there and assimilate. When Svein Forkbeard and Cnut invade, a century later, most of what they find for a fifth column of support is in the North.
This had to take me back to two BM monographs, one old, but both good. Michael Dolley, Viking Coins of the Danelaw and of Dublin (1965), and Garth WIlliams, The Vale of York Hoard (2010).

 

Fantastic coins, very enlightening information. Wish I could help with the symbolism.... Okay, here's the nearest to a thought, but I hope it's wrong. What if the devices are purely decorative, in a way that anticipates the kind of riffing that happens with AEthelred motifs in Denmark (especially) over a century later? Decoration for its own sake was, after all, a conspicuous part of the 'Viking' (...and, Right, Anglo-Saxon and Hiberno-Celtic) aesthetic. ....Like I said, hope I'm wrong, and one of your guesses is right.

 

There might be a better post to put this under, maybe even a brand new one, but it's Such A Great Post, from FitzNigel's contribution onward (present company last), it was hard to resist.
This is all about peck marks. They're so near-ubiquitous from the late 10th-mid-11th centuries, in Anglo-Saxon, Ottonian, and early Salian issues, that I had to find a Carolingian example that had some, vaguely dating to the original 'Danegelds' from the mid-9th century. I'd heard that they exist, initially in reference to the Cuerdale Hoard.
...Okay, here's a shred of relevance to this thread, especially Egry's frankly amazing contribution. Carolingian prototypes influenced a number of Norse Yorkish issues, including ones of Cnut. One even had a degraded 'KAROLVS' monogram. (For this, all I have is Michael Dolley's old, but Good BM monograph, Viking Coins of the Danelaw [including York] and of Dublin, pp.19-20 and Plate VI.)
Anyway, found this one on French ebay. It's of Melle; of a type predating the 'GDR' ('GRATIA D-I REX') issue, which begins in 865. Oddly, the later 'GDR' type, while ubiquitous from other mints, seems never to have been used at Melle. Given which, this is an early, Carolingian (rather than feudal), and very common immobilization. Right, there's relatively subtle degradation of the legends even in this context. The likeliest regnal culprit for this would seem to be Charles the Simple. Who, as everyone in the choir will know, ceded the initial, eastern third of Normandy to Rollo (who, like Cnut and later kings of York, was Norse, not Danish) in 911. (Cf. David Bates, Nody Bermanfore 1066 (Longman, 1982), Chapter 1 passim and Map 2.) At best, this is a sketchily informed guess, likely animated (vs. informed) by wishful thinking. But the immobilizations would predate his iconic Melle issue, with 'MET VLLO' in two lines. ...'Iconic' by virtue of subsequent, feudal immobilization of that issue, far into the 12th century. (For the full range of variants, from Carolingian, to Carolingian immobilizations, to feudal ones, see
Depeyrot, Le Numeraire Carolingien, 3rd ed. (2008), No. 629; cf. 630, 631.
Nouchy, Les Rois Carolingiens (1994), pp. 264-5.
Duplessy, Monnaies Francaises Feodales, Tome I (2004), pp. 222-224. Roberts, The Silver Coins of Medieval France (1996), Nos. 3861-8.)
...Right, all the way back to the coin in question, it goes like this:
Obv. Cross. +CARLVS REX FR[ANCIA].
Rev. 'KAROLVS' monogram. +MET X VLLO. (Melle.) (Depeyrot, No. 627 and plate, p. 287.)
Right, this was French ebay. The type, common as it is, was fully attributed, but the dealer lowered the price because of those unsightly peck marks! It was like, Yessss! I'm Having that!

 

Sorry to resurrect an old thread with a question, but if anyone's looking, I could use some help with this coin:



It came from a Polish auction with no provenance, and with no attribution, just "Scandinavian imitation", it looks to imitate Aethelred II, but two different types, with the obverse copying the long cross type and the reverse the crux type.

The first letter of the obverse legend looks like an 'S' but that's about as far as I can get.

My initial thought was that it was more likely to be a continental European imitation rather than Scandinavian, but the Polish auctioneer (who did a decent cataloging job) didn't think it was German, Bohemian, Pomeranian, etc. I think the closest I'll be able to get is "Baltic/North Sea world", but if anyone has any ideas to set me on the right track, I'd love to hear them!

 

@Nap - my initial thought was the same as yours. I don’t have any of my books with me, but there is something about it that “feels” Bohemian. They did do some early English imitations, but none that look like this (that I can think of off the top of my head anyway…). So at least continental or Baltic I would feel more comfortable with. The Scandinavian ones are crude, but I haven’t seen any that are this crude… but I don’t know.

Nice pick-up though!