Corrections to Hildebrand's corpus of Anglo-Saxon moneyers: from Cnut to Edward the Confessor

Extract

For a long time now students of early personal names have taken evidence from the many coins whose reverse legends preserve the names of Anglo-Saxon moneyers. Lists have been made which are more or less accurate and comprehensive, often with name forms normalized for convenience. Thus Searle cited, with misgivings, his published sources which included Ruding, Hildebrand and the British Museum Catalogue. The latter in its turn included in its lists many names taken from other collections, often from coins that the compilers had not seen. In fact many of the printed lists of moneyers contain names repeated from earlier lists. To a great extent these derive ultimately from that immense treasury of Viking Age coins, B. E. Hildebrand's systematic arrangement from the Anglo-Saxon content of the Swedish coin hoards. So large were Hildebrand's resources for the reigns of Æthelred and Cnut that his catalogue, published almost a hundred years ago, still comes close to being exhaustive, so that even the recently published Danish national collection adds relatively few coins – or at least legends – that are not registered there, and complements it only in the later reigns when the Scandinavian material becomes more sparse. If Hildebrand's catalogue is to be used as a reference system for the publication of other coins, as is commonly the case particularly in Scandinavia, and if philological use is to be made of Hildebrand's transcriptions, his source material, the coins themselves, must be subject to a new scrutiny.