A PARCEL OF LONG-GROSS COINS—? FROM THE 1869 TOWER HILL HOARD

By R. H. M. DOLLEY and W. A. SEABY, F.S.A.

[PI. XII I ]

IN the spring of 1965 Mr. Brian Spencer, F.S.A., of the London Museum made available to us for purposes of study a parcel of 24 silver pennies and 9 cut halfpennies which that institution had just acquired through the good offices of Mr. F. M. Underhill, F.S.A., of Datchet. The coins had been found together in the desk of a Mr. A. E. Cook who died in 1889, and had passed to his daughters who are still alive. Mr. Cook was a solicitor in partnership with a Mr. Clayton, their offices being in Great George Street, Westminster, while their practice had a pronounced ecclesiastical flavour, being concerned almost entirely with the affairs of the Dean and of individual Canons of Westminster Abbey. There might have been a certain presumption, then, that the 33 coins in question, all but one of them identically patinated, had come to light in the immediate vicinity of the Abbey, if not indeed within the actual precincts, but that the find is one already known to numismatic science is suggested by consideration of the composition of those hoards composed exclusively, or even predominantly, of Long-Cross pennies of Henry I I I which are on record as having been discovered before the year of Mr. Cook's death. Of those listed in Mr. Thompson's Inventory, two only seem to be relevant, the Bantry hoard of 1834 (Inv. 33), and the Tower Hill (London) hoard of 1869 (Inv. 254). The possibility, however, that Mr. Cook's parcel might derive from the Irish hoard is one that can safely be dismissed, if only because in his parcel one third of the coins are of Lawrence class Vg, whereas a recent note has sought to demonstrate that the Bantry find, occasioned as it was by the McCarthy resurgence which culminated in the battle of Callan in 1261, contained no coin of class Vg, and no coin demonstrably later than class Vd.1

That the Tower Hill find is the most likely provenance for Mr. Cook's coins is not perhaps so immediately obvious. This hoard came to light some twenty years before his death, and the portion surrendered to the Crown appears to have been constituted as follows:—•

English whole pennies 209 out halfpennies 72 cut farthings 19

Irish pennies 3 Scottish pennies 2

Fortunately, too, this parcel was the subject of a detailed report by Sir John Evans,2 and on

1 R. H. M. Dolley, 'The 1834 Bantry Find and the Battle of Callan', Journ. Cork Hist. & Arch. Soc., LXXI , 213, pp. 135-139.

2 NC 1869, pp. 247-256. In the printed text Sir John Evans describes the find as having been made 'last March', and this might suggest that the year of the discovery was 1868 and not 1869, and the more so because Sir John's paper was read to the Society on 16 April 1869 which would leave at most six weeks for the coins to find their way to him, to be classified and listed, and to be the

subject of seizure by the Crown. I t is clear, however, from M. Harrison's London betieath the Pavement (London, 1961) that the tunnel which was the occasion of the discovery did not begin to be driven until 1869 (op. cit., p. 133), and March 1869 seems clearly indicated as the date of the hoard's discovery. It may well be, though, that the paper as read and the paper as published bore little relation to each other, and that the latter did not go to the printer until the summer or even early autumn of 1869.

A P A R C E L O F L O N G - C R O S S C O I N S - ? F R O M T H E 1869 T O W E R H I L L H O A R D 105

the basis of his descriptions it is possible to be fairly confident that the chronological pattern presented by the whole English pennies was as follows:—

Lawrence Class I 2

I I 5

I I I 64

I V —

V 138

In other words, coins of Lawrence class V were twice as numerous as those of class III, while, on the assumption that the 300 coins discovered were representative of the find as a whole, a random parcel of 33, such as Mr. Cook's, ought to have included at least one cut farthing and probably two, seven or eight cut halfpence, the same number of whole pennies of class I I I and fifteen or so whole pennies of class V. Admittedly Mr. Cook's parcel contains no cut farthings, the most likely coins to have been overlooked or discarded by a non-numismatist, but the figures for the cut halfpennies and for the class I I I and V pennies, nine, eight and sixteen respectively, do correspond very closely to expectation. Of course it could be objected that in all hoards from a given date the proportion of old to new coins should be fairly constant, but if we glance at the broadly comparable Palmer's Green (London) find of 1911 (Inv. 247 & 248), Steppingley find of 1912 {Inv. 342) and Coventry find of 1958, it is to note the proportion of coins of class I I I has slumped from approximately 33-|% to at most 20%. In other words coins of Lawrence class V are not twice as numerous as those of class I I I but four times, and the coincidence of the figures for the Tower Hill find and for Mr. Cook's parcel seems the more remarkable.

I t has been observed elsewhere that the proportion of coins of Renaud and, to a lesser extent, of Alein affords a useful index of the date of those hoards which end with coins of Lawrence class Vg (or Vh), and it is interesting to note that the proportion of Renaud and of Alein coins in the Tower Hill find and in Mr. Cook's parcel is so consistent with the hypo-thesis that the latter derives from the former. In the Tower Hill hoard there were 34 pennies of Renaud and three of Alein, so that in Mr. Cook's parcel one might have expected to find five or six pennies of Renaud and not more than one of Alein. In fact the figures are five and one. This contrasts with the position obtaining in the case of the virtually contemporan-eous Palmer's Green find, and of the only slightly later finds from Coventry and Steppingley, as is brought out by the following table:—

R E N A U D A L E I N

No. of coins % of find No. of coins % of find

T O W E R H I L L 3 4 1 5 - 0 3 1 - 5

' M E . C O O K ' S P A R C E L ' 5 1 5 - 0 1 3 . 0

P A L M E R ' S G R E E N 1 5 7 ' 5 — —

C O V E N T R Y 4 0 2 0 - 0 5 2 - 0

S T E P P I N G L E Y 1 2 3 2 5 - 0 1 3 3 . 0

I t is indeed difficult to escape the conclusion that Mr. Cook was in possession of a parcel of coins from the Tower Hill hoard of 1869, and especially since there is some reason to think that coins from this find escaped the net of the then treasure trove regulations denounced with unusual acerbity by Sir John Evans in his listing of the coins that passed through

A PARCEL OF LONG-CROSS COINS-? FROM T H E 1869 T O W E R H I L L H O A R D 106

his hands.1 Mr. C. E. Blunt, F.B.A., for example, has in his cabinet four Long-Cross pennies (IHb, Lincoln, Willem; London, Henri (2): Vg, London, Renaud) which were given to him in 1959 by the late Mr. W. J . Hemp, F.S.A., who stated that they had been given to his grand-father (d. Oct. 1869) with 'the moat of the Tower of London' as the provenance. Sir John Evans, too, himself remarked 'A load of rubbish had already been removed from the spot before any of the coins were noticed, and there is reason to believe that a considerable number of them had been taken away with it'. I t should also be observed that all the coins that we have seen, those in the British Museum with the Tower Hill provenance, those now in the London Museum, and the four in Mr. Blunt's collection, have a consistent patination, and the greater probability, amounting almost to a certainty, must be that Mr. Cook's parcel derives from the 1869 find on Tower Hill. There is, though, no reason to think that the coins were among those listed by Sir John Evans, and it is noticeable that the legend of no. 5 in the catalogue that follows is one unrecorded by him.

The 33 coins in the London Museum are listed here in accordance with the principles adopted for the publication of the recent Coventry and Winchester finds, the 'L' numbers referring to the legends recorded by L. A. Lawrence under each variety. The first coin, for example, corresponds to the second legend given by Lawrence under the heading IIIc on p. 90 of his paper in the 1913 volume of this Journal (p. 58 of the repaginated offprint). All the coins are illustrated in the same order on the plate (PI. XIII) .

B U R Y ST. EDMUNDS

I O N

(1) Class I I I c L2 19-3 grains Pierced and rubbed (2) I I I c L l - 3 10-5 Cut / / E D M / V N D

(3) Ya L7 19-6

C A N T E R B U R Y

A L E I N

(4) Class Vg L27 21-6 grains

G I L B E R T

(5) Class Vg L3 var . 21-1 grains E B ligulate and C A N T

I O H S , I O N , e t c .

(6) Class Vb L8 var . 21-5 grains o N ligulate in moneyer 's name (7) Vc L8 var . 23-4 h' (8) Vc L3 22-1 (9) Vc L4? 10-5 Cut | d / ON / CAN /

N I C O L E

(10) Class M b L4 21-5 grains (11) Vc L10 ? 10-2 Cut i d NIC / — — / / ANT crescents (12) I I I c L4 or 5 ? 1 M Cut -|d / OLE / ONC / (13) I I I c L4 or 5 ? 10-7 Cut | d NIC / / / ANT (14) Vg L10 22-2

1 NG 1869, p. 247 'They [the coins] have since come down to us from semi-barbarous times, and been claimed as treasure-trove by the solicitor to which clearly causes the destruction and conceal-the Treasury, under a mischievous law that has ment of numerous antiquities'.

A P A R C E L O F LONG-CROSS C O I N S - ? F R O M T H E 1869 T O W E R H I L L H O A R D 107

(15) Class Vg

(16) Class Vg

L19

L13

R O B E R T

22-7 grains

W I L L E M

21-6 grains

(17) Class I l l b L3 var.

ILCHESTER (?)

S T E P H E N

11T grains Cut i d STE I phE (?) I I with pellet over h.

(18) Class I l l b L3 var.

LINCOLN

R I C A R D

21-4 grains

(19) Class I IIc (20) I IIc (21) Yb

(22) Class Vg (23) Vg (24) Vg (25) Vg (26) Vg

(27) Class Vc

L7 L8 or 9 L4 var.

L22/21 ? L22/21 ? L22/21 ? L22 L22

L14

L O N D O N

H E N E I

10'2 grains 10-2 18-7

R E N A U D

24'2 grains 20-2 22-2 21-6 21-0

RICARD

22-1 grains

Cut | D 1 RIO I NLV I •

C u t W I IEN I BIO I I •

O I N L

(28) Class Vg (?) L?

U N C E R T A I N

9-0 grains Cut id . Unusual work and rev. legend ( ?) ending VND retrograde

(29) Class I l l b L10

NORTHAMPTON

W I L L E M

23-0 grains

(30) Class I l l b L2

NORWICH

J A C O B

21-6 grains

(31) Class I l i a L9 var. W I L L E M

21-7 grains REX . III

108 A P A R C E L O F L O N G - C R O S S C O I N S - ? F R O M T H E 1869 T O W E R H I L L H O A R D 108

W I N C H E S T E R

N I C O L E

(32) Class IIIc L6 21-9 grains

Y O R K

J E R E M I E

(33) Class I l l b L5 22'8 grains

I t only remains for us to express our gratitude to those who have been mentioned in the course of this paper, to Dr. Joan Evans, F.S.A., who was no less kind in answering questions addressed to her on certain aspects of her father's researches, and to Mr. Peter Woodhead who was good enough to check the identifications and to assist in the mounting of the plate.

C O I N S F R O M T H E 1 8 6 9 T O W E R H I L L H O A R D ?