Medieval Monday!

Within its perameters, Stewartby's English Coins 1180-1551 is likely the most current (2009 ), and sometimes dauntingly exhaustive (...for some of us) in both its prefatory analyses and cataloguing. He reliably lists variants above and beyond what North got to. ...As @FitzNigel said, North is a bit dated, but much more so in scope than in the reliability of what's there.

 

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Another fantastic sceatta, @Roerbakmix. Older copies of a similar type show up at regular intervals on UKebay. --Not that you'd be fooled!
Solid Henry V, @robp --and thanks for weighing in on @malinkyhoy's example! Glad the news was better than my last guess or two.
By way of bridging the chronlogical gap, here's a later 10th century denier of Troyes, immobilized from the GDR issues of Charles II. Dumas (6675) tentatively assigns it to Herbert 'the Elder' of Vermandois, during his tenure as baillistre (less than formal translation: 'bailiff') of Troyes from 967 to 983.
Obv. Degraded Carolingian monogram; (from 6 o'clock: ) +CRACIA D-I [RE]X.
Rev. +TRECAS CIVI.

 

There was a time when you could see these everywhere from CGB to French ebay and the many shops and auction houses from France, but now for some reason not so much. I wonder why.

County of Rodez in Occitania, Hugo II de Millau, ca. 1160-1180 or ca. 1200, ex French private collection:


The County of Rodez was a fief of the County of Toulouse and Hugues de Rodez owed homage to the Counts of Toulouse for his title. The denier of Rodez was a moneta octena (8/12 silver alloy) during this period (G. Depeyrot - Le tresor de Toulouse et le numeraire feodal aux XII et XIIIe siecle; In: Annales du Midi : revue archéologique, historique et philologique de la France méridionale, Tome 94, N°157, 1982. pp. 125-149, p. 133).

From the 1130s to possibly 1274 (or at the very least ca. 1215, if the mint did not cease to coin around 1208/10 to ca. 1220 as Depeyrot hypothesizes p. 135) the coinage of Rodez consisted of an immobilized type in the name of Hugo. With a lower diameter and weight, the S couche and the long Gs and Cs, this specimen is likely minted under Hugo II perhaps up to 1200, being what would be called in 1283 moneta antiqua, to be separated from the later coinage or moneta nova, that was probably in use since 1274(?) cf. Depeyrot p. 134.

The deniers ugonencs of the 12th to mid 13th century were one of the prime circulating denominations in Rouergue-Languedoc, at the very least until the Albigensian Crusade (Depeyrot p. 130), as it shows in the tresor de Toulouse (40% of the coins recovered are deniers from Rodez, Depeyrot p. 133).

 

Terrific example and numiscatico-historical background, @seth77.
Your citations of French journals never fail to elicit admiration, along with the inexorable tinge of envy. Any time you wanted to include links to anything that might be available online, you'd have one fan! ...I'll wade through as much of them as I can.

 

I think I sent you that material by Bompaire et al about metallurgical and typological considerations on the coinage of Alphonse de France. If you found that one useful I could perhaps archive a few similar ones and send it to you via WeTransfer. PM me with your mail address.

 

Massive thanks! Could you include the Bompaire article? I know it's somewhere (I've only seen one other article of his --citing it for my sole effort so far in academia.edu), but it would be great to have everything in one place.
...Hope you don't need to have WeTransfer installed in order to receive stuff from it. Cautious optimism ensues.

 

Well, I was planning on posting earlier today since the semester was wrapping up, and I had just a couple of exams left to grade. Except when I went into work I discovered my classroom had flooded over the weekend (and those exams were now gone…). So, for my ugly day, I shall present an ugly coin to go with it:
Feudal France - Normandy
William II-William Clito/Henry I, r. 1035-1135 (1075-1130)
AR Denier, 19.65 mm x 0.8 grams
Obv.: +NORMAN DVX. Cross pattee with pellets in angles
Rev.: Degenerate chapel, pellet in pediment, two pellets and annulets to either side, pellet and Greek cross underneath
Ref.: Dumas XX-1, Roberts, 4833
Note: Dumas group C et D according to Moesgaard

 

Cordial commiserations. Still catching my breath. Hope you're done with that phase, at least by now.
...Yep, that's a beautifully ugly Norman.
(Edit: ) Glad that it's at least safe to assume that there weren't any casualties among your library.

 

actually there were. A student had just gifted me some books with a lot of primary source documents which I was going to use in my class, and those were mostly ruined. The textbook for my class was completely destroyed. The school will be able to replace the textbook, and at least pay for the other books, but losing a gift feels so much more damaging (even if they are just books…)

 

Oh, Crap. Sorry about all of it, except for the (very) selective good news.
--Nope, the phrase, 'just books' is appropriate to the likes of old (no disrespect to the author ...anyway) Stephen King paperbacks. The triangulation between the content and the occasion really registers. Hoping the books in question aren't too hard to 'replace.' Just, Sorry for your net loss.

 

I'm real sorry top great about your rough day and the loss of books and primary source documents @FitzNigel I've always loved books and the loss of them really pains me. I'll add an ugly coin to this thread in sympathy. It's a penny of Edward III struck at the Durham mint during the treaty transitional period. Even with the condition it is a really pleading coin.

 

With thanks to @TheRed for proceeding along similar lines, here's one that only a mother, or an early-feudal fanatic could love. Another mid-later 10th c. immobilization of the GDR type, this time from Tours, tentatively attributed to Thibaut le Tricheur (/Trickster), who was effectively the patriarch of the counts of Champagne (beginning from the county of Troyes), along with Blois (nearest to Tours) and Chartres. This early, the dynastic connections between Troyes et al. and Vermandois were recent, and correspondingly pronounced. (With reference to my last entry, just above.)
Tours, immobilized GDR denier. Motifs and legends effectively the same as the example of Troyes; cf. Dumas 6935-6953.
Here's the page from the auction that landed me this. A couple others have since shown up in current auctions, from (can I name names, anyway?) .cgb and Frank Robinson.
https://www.elsen.eu/List-290/MOYEN...-275/emodule/4238/eitem/95820#textarea2900271

 

This small denier arrived last week. Just as the Lucca denaro I posted above, it is a type that circulated heavily in the Latin East:


France, Bishopric of Valence, AR denier, ca. 1090–1225 AD. Obv: + VRBS VALENTIAI; stylized angel or eagle facing. Rev: + S APOLLINARS, cross pomme with annulet in quadrant. 18mm, 1.04g. Ref: Duplessy 2255.

 

Really, no, Really exceptional example, @Orielensis. A truly stunning convergence. Starting with the fully legible strike, proceeding to a state which suggests, from here, that it was committed to the ground within the week that it saw the light of day.
(...My only, duly representative one was bought, at least to my knowledge, before coins and photography became a thing. I always wanted to do a post on the "Post an Old Coin and an Old Tune" thread, pairing it (my example, mind you) with Hendrix, "Angel," from his last preposthumous album.)

 

I believe the Toulouse denier was also quite common in the Latin East, correct? I always meant to track down the primary source which recorded what coins the Crusaders brought with them and put together a set…
French Feudal - Toulouse
Raymond V-VII, r. 1148-1249
AR Denier, 19mm x 1.1 grams
Obv.: RAMON COMES, Cross Pattee in center, S in second quarter
Rev.: +TOLOSA CIVI, PAX in center
Ref.: Duplessy 1228, Roberts 4226, De Wit 442

 

Solid example, @FitzNigel. Wish I knew which chronicle it was (not on the shelves), but one of the ones about the First Crusade --Fulcher of Chartres, maybe?-- goes into some real detail about what was in circulation among the crusaders as of then.
...Which is the best I'm likely to do, where primary documentation is concerned. Granted, this issue postdates the initial phases, but your memory* is obviously serving you very well. For people tuning in late, an earlier Raymond of Toulouse was a participant in the First Crusade, netting (with his descendants) the Frankish Levantine County of Tripoli for their pains.
*In my case --as in, not yours!-- I like to refer to memory I have of this sort of thing, in the absence of easy access to books, as 'muscle memory.' Thank you, with commensurate connotations. Right, you can sit that out!!!

 

Here's a Salian (11th c.) denar that probably never got posted. ...You will see why!



The only reference I have for 11th -12th century German is Dannenberg; old, and only available to yours truly from Google Books. (...Can Anyone Like .pdf?!?!?) Here's a better example, from Leu Numismatik, with much better references. https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6277526

 

Some deniers of Toulouse did end up in the Levant, but mostly the issues of Alphonse Jourdain who joined the Second Crusade in 1147. Not sure on the coins of the later Raymonds on the other hand.

As for the "erat haec nostra moneta" mentioned by Raymond d'Aguilers, he makes no mention of the tolosan in his enumeration of coinages, although he was close to Raymond IV of Toulouse: "Pictavini, Cartenses, Manses, Luccenses, Valenziani, Melgorienses, et duo pogesi pro unum istarum." (in Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Ierusalem).

From these coinages, the Valenziani (valentinenses) et Melgorienses (megorensi) are to me the most interesting as they (at least the valentinenses) seem to have been more at home in the Levant and more specifically in northern Syria than in Europe. Virtually all lots that I have seen offered at auctions are of these Frankish coins paired with the denarii of Antioch.

Check out the nice, golden-toned Syrian patina on this spec:



Bernard de Valence, who became Latin Patriarch of Antioch (1100-1135), had a direct connection and was likely the governing force that influenced the wholesale import to Syria of the denarii valentinenses, which continued very likely until the Principality started minting its own deniers under Raymond de Poitiers in the 1140s. Although the type possibly originated earlier, to 1090 or even 1075 according to R. Chareyron - Essai de datation et de classement des monnaie des eveches de Valence et Die et des comtes de Valentinois et Diois, Revue Dromoise vol. 92, 493-4, pp. 29, 1999 and M. Philips - A hoard of French feudal coins from the First Crusade, The Numismatic Chronicle, vol. 162, p. 403, 2002, 1100 is the likely terminus post quem for the large-scale minting operation of these denarii, likely for this precise purpose of being used by the crusaders in Syria.

 

Solid example, @seth77, replete with your typically enlightening erudition. Many thanks!
...Oh no, it's Tuesday, but this looks like the right place to post this example of the type of Melgueil. As you admirably noted, it found mention in the chronicle of Raymond d'Aguilers (Melgorienses).
This one of Melgueil was advertised, without further elaboration, as a 'Crusader' imitation. At the time, all I had as precedent was an example, also unambiguously AE, imitating the type of (drum-roll, please...) Valence, from the Maskukat Collection. ...Second row, with an example of the prototype: http://medievalcoins.ancients.info/crusader_kingdoms_of_the_levant.htm
Right, the coin.

 

The copper version of pseudo-Valence also looks cast? A very interesting piece especially as it comes from Tripoli where, presumably, the mintage of western-style deniers started a bit earlier (as early as Bertram in 1110) and were joined by copper fractions of specific tripolitanian types early on too. This might suggest that, if this copper coin actually circulated as legal tender in Tripoli or the county at large, it must predate the introduction of the local coinage.