Grosvenor Museum, Chester. Part II

This is the second and concluding volume in the SCBI series devoted to the collection of Anglo-Saxon and Norman coins in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester. The Grosvenor Museum's holdings in this field derive partly from the matchless collection of coins of the Chester mint formed during the first half of the twentieth century by Dr Willoughby Gardner (1860-1953), and partly from a succession of major hoards of tenth-century date discovered in the city of Chester at intervals since the 1850s.As a result, the Grosvenor Museum collection is of national importance for the study of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon coinage, and the present volume describes and illustrates hundreds of previously unpublished coins of this period.The volume also contains an introductory essay discussing the history of the Chester mint between its foundation in the early years of the tenth century and the major reform of the English coinage carried out in the closing years of the reign of King Edgar (959-75). It explains how to distinguish coins struck at Chester from comparable coins struck at neighbouring mints including Derby, Stafford and Tamworth, and puts on record the fact that during Chester's mid-tenth-century heyday its moneyers were more numerous and probably more productive than those at such other major English cities as London and Winchester.