Scragg Donald (Edited). Edgar, King of the English 959-975: New Interpretations (Pubns Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies)

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204 HUGH PAGAN

the two years between 957 and 959 during which Edgar reigned as king in

Mercia and apparently in the rest of England north of the Thames, while his

brother Eadwig reigned in England south of the Thames. The authors of CTCE

concluded that there was no numismatic evidence to show that Edgar went as

far as having coins struck in his name, although they accepted that Edgar ‘may

well have taken the proﬁts from the mints under his control’.

In the course of

their remarks they did however draw attention to the fact that Eadwig’s reign

saw unexpectedly substantial issues of coins from mints in southern Mercia, i.e.

in the south-east Midlands, the manufacture of which would have to be concen-

trated into the ﬁrst two years of Eadwig’s reign if he was unable to have coins

struck in his name at mints in Mercia thereafter. They do not expand on this

statement, but the situation is exempliﬁed by the content of the Chester 1950

hoard, in which there was a substantial group of mint-signed coins of Eadwig

of Horizontal Trefoil 3 (HT3) type (with a three-line inscription on the reverse,

of which the central line gives the mint name), struck at Bedford, Northampton

and a mint which may have been Newport Pagnell, and there were also almost

as many coins of Eadwig of the normal Horizontal Trefoil type originating from

the same general area, without mint signatures but struck by several of the same

moneyers as those of HT3 type.

o substantive types were therefore produced in this part of southern Mercia

under Eadwig, and it would certainly seem rather hard to have to concentrate

the issue of both types into a two-year period. It can also be noted that although

mules exist between coins of Eadred and Eadwig, and between coins of Eadwig

and Edgar, no mule has yet been recorded between Mercian coins of Eadred and

Edgar, as might have occurred had there been only a two-year gap between their

respective issues. That said, no coins at all are known that are likely to have been

struck for Eadwig at East Anglian mints, despite the fact that such coins should

certainly exist for the period 955–7, if not for 957–9 as well, and any new hoard

deposited in Wessex, Mercia or East Anglia between 955 and 960 is likely to be

extremely informative.

inally

, it has been common ground among numismatists since the discovery

of the Chester 1950 hoard that coins of the second and third quarters of the

tenth century which carry rosettes as part of their design – whether as a central

feature, as on coins of Circumscription type, or above, below and between the

lines of the reverse inscription, as on coins of Horizontal Rosette type – were

all struck within the frontiers of the historic kingdom of Mercia. It can be es-

tablished from coins of Circumscription Rosette type struck under Æthelstan

that at that period coins with rosettes on were struck by moneyers at Chester,

Hereford, Shrewsbury, Stafford, and at a mint that may have been Warwick, and

not elsewhere. In the reign of Edmund, a coinage of Horizontal Rosette type

was initially struck at the same range of mints, but after Edmund’s recovery of

the Five Boroughs in 942 coins of Horizontal Rosette type were also produced

at Derby and perhaps at Nottingham and elsewhere in the more northerly ter-

CTCE, pp. 278–80.

THE PRE-REFORM COINAGE OF EDGAR 205

ritories of the Five Boroughs as well. In the reigns of Eadred and Eadwig the

area within which coins of Rosette types were manufactured seems to have

been broadly the same, although it looks as if Hereford no longer fell within its

boundaries. In the pre-Reform period of Edgar’s reign Warwick seems also to

have fallen outside the relevant area and there is no certain evidence for coin

production at Shrewsbury. Tamworth however emerges as an additional identiﬁ-

able mint where Rosette coins were produced, although moneyers there may in

fact already have been producing Rosette coins without mint signatures in the

reigns of Edgar’s immediate predecessors.

can thus see that there was a deﬁned area in the north-west Midlands

where coins with Rosette designs were the customary currency between Æthel-

stan’s reign and Edgar’s reform, and that there was a parallel area in the north-

central Midlands where coins with Rosette designs were the customary currency

between 942 and Edgar’s reform. It is a matter for historians to decide if these

areas corresponded with administrative areas, but a major priority for numisma-

tists is to determine the geographical extent of the area in the north-central Mid-

lands in which coins of Horizontal Rosette type and Circumscription Rosette

type were manufactured and circulated. It does seem probable on general

grounds that it extended to cover Nottingham, a mint town to which no coins of

non-Rosette types can be plausibly attributed, but it is still worryingly uncertain

to what extent coins of Rosette type may have been struck at other places within

the former territory of the Five Boroughs. Indeed, it has been pointed out in

this context that Iole, a Derby moneyer in Edgar’s Circumscription Rosette type,

may be the same individual who recurs as a Stamford moneyer after Edgar’s

reform,

and it cannot as yet be claimed that we know where the monetary

frontiers between the north-central Midlands, the north-east Midlands and the

south-east Midlands lay.

CTCE, p. 162.

206 HUGH PAGAN

Table 9.1: Moneyers working at Chester between 946 and 979

The tabulation of moneyers for the Reform Small Cross type includes moneyers who

struck coins of this design in the reigns of Edward the Martyr and Æthelred II.

EADRED EADWIG EDGAR

HR2 HR3 CC and CR HR2 HR3 RSC

Ælfsig(e) Ælfsig(e) Ælfsig(e) Ælfsig Ælfsig

Ælfstan Elfstan Ælfstan Ælfstan

Deorulf Deorulf Deorulf Deorlaf Deorlaf

Duran Duran

Eadmund Eadmund Eadmund Eadmund Eadmund

Eoferard Eoferard Eoferard

Eoroth Eoroth Eoroth Eoroth Eoroth

Frard Frard

Frothric Freotheric Freotheric Freotheric Frothric

Gilles Gilys Gilys Gillys Gillys

Mærten Martin Martin

Siferth Siferth Siferth

Sunu

Teothred Teothred

Theodulf

Thurmod Thurmod Thurmod Thurmod Thurmod Thurmod

Werstan Werstan Werstan Werstan

Wilaf

Wilsig Wilsig Wilsig

Wulfstan

Ethelstan

Aldewine Aldewine Aldewine

Ælfred

Æthelm Ethelm

Alhmund

Leofstan Leofstan

Teothuc Teothuc

Boia Bogea

Flodger

Mælsuthan Mælsuthan

Monna

Wulgar

THE PRE-REFORM COINAGE OF EDGAR 207

Table 9.2: Moneyers working at Derby, ‘NE’, Stafford and Tamworth between the

mid 960s and 979

The tabulation of moneyers for the Reform Small Cross type includes moneyers who

struck coins of this design in the reigns of Edward the Martyr and Æthelred II.

CC and CR HR2 HR3 RSC

Amund (S)

Ber(e)nard (D)

Boiga (D) Boia (D)

Deorulf (T) Deorulf (T) Deorulf (T)

Eofermund (T)

Frethic (D)

Gunar (D) Gunar Gunar (D)

Iole (D)

Man (D)

Osulf (D) Osulf (D)

Othelric (D) Othelriht

Ælfred (NE)

Eofrlf (T)

Grim (D) Grim (D)

Leofwine (T) Lefwine (T)

Monna (T) Mana (T)

Siulf (NE) Siulf (S)

Ælfsie (S)

Edgar and the Monastic Revival

The Chronology of the Benedictine ‘Reform’

JULIA BARROW

HE process which saw the foundation of the great medieval English Ben-

edictine monasteries in the tenth century was, if not necessarily the most

important development within the English church of the time, certainly the best

recorded.

Many aspects of the process – including the use of the term ‘reform’

– have been undergoing re-evaluation recently.

However, mapping out the

chronology of the Benedictine movement overall has not been attempted since

David Farmer sketched it out in the early 1970s, summarising the account in

David Knowles’ Monastic Order, so it is high time to re-attempt it.

Chronology

matters because establishing the sequence of events is a necessary step before

working out causation and inﬂuence. It also allows us to observe which group

of people was operating in any particular context. This paper will deal with the

chronology of the Benedictine movement in Edgar’s reign not only because

Edgar is the subject of the volume, but also because his reign was the most

dynamic period of the process.

Part of the key to working out the chronology

of the Benedictine movement under Edgar is the identiﬁcation of a satisfactory

date for Regularis Concordia, the set of uniform monastic customs commis-

sioned by Edgar and written by Æthelwold of Winchester to be followed by all

inmates of Benedictine communities in England. Regularis Concordia became

necessary once there were several houses in existence following slightly dif-

Blair, Church, pp. 346–54, esp. 351; a numerically far more signiﬁcant phenomenon of

the same period, though very poorly recorded, was the growth of parish churches: Blair,

Church, pp. 368–425.

On the use of the term ‘reform’ to describe the phenomenon, see Julia Barrow, ‘The Ideas

and Application of Reform’, The Cambridge History of Christianity, III, 600–1100, ed.

F. X. Noble and J. M. H. Smith (forthcoming, 2008), and Julia Barrow, ‘The Ideology

of the Tenth-century English Benedictine “Reform” ’, Challenging the Boundaries of

Medieval

History, ed. Patricia Skinner (forthcoming).

D. H. Farmer, ‘The Progress of the Monastic Revival’, Tenth-Century Studies: Essays

in Commemoration of the Council of Winchester and Regularis Concordia, ed. David

Parsons (Chichester, 1975); David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England, 2nd ed.

(Cambridge, 1963), pp. 31–56. Cf. also comments by Eric John, ‘Some Latin Charters

of the Tenth-century Reformation in England’, Revue bénédictine 70 (1960), 333–59, and

Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 2 vols. (Aldershot, 2000), I.95 and n. 38.

Blair, Church, pp. 350–1, and literature there cited.

212 JULIA BARROW

ferent variations of the Benedictine routine, which Edgar viewed as a worrying

development. He wished to impose a uniﬁed observance on all monks and nuns

in his kingdom.

Regularis Concordia in Traditional Chronology

The dating of Regularis Concordia is uncertain, though it must precede Edgar’s

death on 8 July 975 and cannot be earlier than his marriage to Ælfthryth in 964

(or, at the latest, 965), since she is given a major responsibility in the text, being

put in charge of all the nunneries in the kingdom. Over the last half-century

historians have usually placed the work late in Edgar’s reign, c. 970 or in 973,

in the year when Edgar was crowned in Bath.

Symons, the editor of Regularis

Concordia, thought that the meeting at Winchester could not have been held until

after each of the three major ecclesiastical ﬁgures in the process, Archbishop

Dunstan of Canterbury, Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester and Bishop Oswald of

Worcester, had begun to found, or run, monasteries.

Dunstan’s Glastonbury and

Æthelwold’s Abingdon had both existed before Edgar became king,

but Oswald

only set up his ﬁrst monastery after he became bishop of Worcester (961). This

was a small community of clerks and children which was gathered together by

Oswald and which he housed in the church at Westbury on Trym near Bristol;

Byrhtferth in his Vita Oswaldi does not supply a date for the coming together

of this group but places it in his narrative immediately after his account of how

Oswald became bishop. He also says that because Westbury was a parochia

Oswald was unable to promise it permanently to the monks, since he feared

For discussion of the date of Edgar and Ælfthryth’s marriage, see n. 38 below. For views

on the dating of Regularis Concordia, see Symons, RC, p. xxiv: ‘The exact date is uncer-

tain, but may be placed between the years 965 when Ælfthryth became Edgar’s queen and

975, the year of Edgar’s death, say 970’; Thomas Symons, ‘The Regularis Concordia and

the Council of Winchester’, Downside Review 80 (1962), 140–156, at 153–6 (972 or 973);

Knowles, Monastic Order, 42: ‘in the neighbourhood of the year 972’; Stenton, ASE,

p. 452, kept his options open: ‘between 963 and 975’; Thomas Symons, ‘Regularis Con-

cordia: History and Derivation’, Tenth-Century Studies, ed. Parsons, pp. 37–59 at 41–2

(973, the year of Edgar’s coronation at Bath); Councils & Synods, I.135 (unlikely to be

before 970, probably 973); Pauline Stafford, Uniﬁcation and Conquest (London, 1989), p.

184 (‘c.970’); Lucia Kornexl, Die

gularis Concordia und ihre altenglische Interlinear-

version, Texte und Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie 17 (Munich, 1993), p. xxv

(between 964/5 and 975, probably 972 or 973); Lucia Kornexl, ‘Regularis Concordia’, in

Blackwell Encycl., p. 389 (‘c.973’); Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of

the English Benedictine Reform, CSASE 25 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 240 (‘c.973’).

Symons, ‘Regularis Concordia: History and Derivation’, 39–42.

For Glastonbury, see Nicholas Brooks, ‘The Career of St Dunstan’, St Dunstan: His Life,

Times and Cult, ed. Nigel Ramsay, Margaret Sparks and Tim Tatton-Brown (Woodbridge,

1992), pp. 1–23, at 11–14, and Lesley Abrams, Anglo-Saxon Glastonbury: Church and

Endowment (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 343–6; for Abingdon, see Vita Æthelwoldi in Lapidge

and Winterbottom, WulfstW, chs. 11, 13, and Alan Thacker, ‘Æthelwold and Abingdon’,

yorke, Æthel

wold, pp. 43–64, esp. 54–8.

BENEDICTINE ‘REFORM’: CHRONOLOGy 213

that his successors would take it back into their control.

Later, Oswald moved

the community to a new site at Ramsey in the Fens.

The dating of Ramsey’s

foundation is not clearly stated in any contemporary source, but is given as 969

in some post-Conquest Ramsey sources.

In Symons’ eyes, Westbury, which

was impermanent, was too unimportant to count as a fully-ﬂedged Oswaldian

monastic foundation. Therefore he took the foundation of Ramsey Abbey as

the terminus post quem for the council which Edgar urged Dunstan, Oswald

and Æthelwold to hold in order to draw up a common set of customs for their

monasteries. This was the council at Winchester at which Regularis Concordia

was promulgated. Symons began with a foundation date for Ramsey of 968 x

970 and thus proposed 970 as the date for the council in his 1953 edition of

Regularis Concordia, but later, in the Tenth Century Studies volume published

in 1975, he suggested that Ramsey could have been founded as late as c. 971,

and chose 973 as the date for the council, linking it with Edgar’s coronation at

Bath in that year.

Symons based his dating for religious houses on Knowles’

Monastic Order and Knowles and Hadcock’s Medieval Religious Houses of

England and Wales, both of which works were largely based, as far as the pre-

Conquest period was concerned, on the early nineteenth century re-edition of

Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum.

In particular Symons did not himself re-

assess the evidence of the date of foundation for Ramsey abbey, and therefore

there is good reason to open up the dating of the entire Benedictine movement

in Edgar’s reign and in particular that of the Winchester Council.

Raine, York, I.423–4. Byrhtferth, who would have been inﬂuenced by continental practice

thanks to Abbo of Fleury, seems to be using the term parochia (in in quadam parochia

sui episcopatus quae Westbyrig dicitur) to mean ‘parish church’; Blair, Church, pp. 427–8,

overlooks this reference when he says that no genuine Anglo-Saxon document uses the

term parochia to mean a parish, but his general thesis, that parochia was not normally

used in England to mean parish until the twelfth century, is right. On the further history

of Westbury see n. 25 below.

Raine, York, I.430–1 and 433–4 on the move to Ramsey and see also below.

The principal Ramsey sources with the 969 foundation date are a forged charter of Edgar

and a list of abbots: Cartularium monasterii de Rameseia, ed. W. H. Hart and P. A. Lyons,

3 vols., RS (London, 1884–93), II.51–9 (S 798) and III.170–89, at 170. The Edgar forgery

(S 798), the earliest manuscript evidence for which is thirteenth-century, bears the date 28

December 974 and says the abbey had been established 5 years and 18 days earlier than

8 November 974, when the church was consecrated. The marginal note giving the date

969 for the construction of stone buildings at Ramsey in the Ramsey Chronicle does not

occur in the earliest manuscript of the Chronicle: cf. Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseiensis,

ed. W. D. Macray, RS 83 (London, 1886), 40. The Chronicle of John of Worcester,

ed.

R. R.

Darlington and Patrick McGurk, 2 vols. to date (II, III) (Oxford, 1995–8), II.418–19, says

a monk of Ramsey became dean of Worcester cathedral in 969: John’s Chronicle may have

been used by Ramsey monks as a source for the foundation date.

Symons, RC, p. xxiii; Symons, ‘Regularis Concordia: History and Derivation’, 42; on the

council of Winchester see below.

Symons, ‘Regularis Concordia: History and Derivation’, 40, n. 20; David Knowles and

R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales, 2nd ed. (London, 1971);

William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, rev. ed. by Bulkeley Bandinel, John Caley and

Henry Ellis, 6 vols. in 8 (London, 1817–30).