ERO Presents: Coin hoarding in Late Saxon Essex

Speaker: Philip Wise

Until recently Essex had provided few finds of interest to those scholars and students studying English coinage of the period from the reform of the coinage by King Eadgar in c.973 to the Domesday Survey of 1086. There were no coin hoards known for this ‘long’ hundred years and comparatively few single finds. All this changed in 2019 with the discovery of the Braintree hoard of coins of Edward the Confessor and Harold II, as well as two Byzantine issues. Further coins from this hoard were found in late 2024 and again on two occasions in 2025. Also in 2025, a completely new hoard of Æthelred II pennies was recovered at Hatfield Peverel, near Chelmsford. This talk describes the coins in both hoards, why they might have been buried and what they can tell us about the use of coins by the population of Essex in the Eleventh Century.

Philip Wise is a museum curator, archaeologist and historian. He read archaeology and anthropology at Downing College, Cambridge and subsequently studied curatorship at the Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester and heritage management at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Philip has worked in a variety of local authority museums since 1983 and has been at Colchester for over 25 years, initially as Curator of Archaeology and more recently as Heritage Manager with responsibilities in both Ipswich and Colchester. Philip also manages the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Essex in partnership with the British Museum. He is currently working on a major project that will see Ipswich Museum completely refurbished and redisplayed for the first time since it originally opened in 1881.

Check in, teas and coffee from 10:00, with our talk starting at 10:40.

Images by kind permission of the British Museum's Portable Antiquities Scheme