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Penny - Æthelstan Diademed bust type
| Issuer | Kingdom of England |
|---|---|
| Year | 924-939 |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Diameter | 21 mm |
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| Obverse description | Diademed bust of King Æthelstan facing right, rendered in a bold and stylized Anglo-Saxon hammered tradition. The king wears a crescent-shaped diadem and a draped mantle, with facial features including a prominent nose and beard indicated by striated lines. A pellet is visible before the bust. The royal effigy is enclosed within a beaded inner circle, with the retrograde and quirky legend ÆDELSTAN REX arranged around the periphery, featuring a horizontal S and an inverted T characteristic of this issue. |
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| Obverse lettering | ÆDELSTAN REX (S horizontal, T inverted) (Translation: King Aethelstan) |
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| Additional information |
Æthelstan was the first king to credibly claim rule over a unified England, and his coinage reflects that ambition directly. Following his defeat of a combined Norse-Scottish-Strathclyde coalition at Brunanburh in 937 — arguably the most consequential battle on English soil before Hastings — he imposed strict monetary reforms requiring all minting to occur in designated boroughs under named moneyers, a policy recorded in his law codes at Grately and Thundersfield.
The proliferation of moneyer names across surviving examples from this type has allowed scholars to map his mint network with unusual precision for the period.