Class 10 cut halfpenny of Henry I

I’ve said a number of times that the information that can be gained from a cut halfpenny depends on where it has been cut. Sometimes it’s possible to identify both the moneyer and mint, at other times it’s just one or the other.

The coin featured here is a class 10 cut halfpenny of Henry I, which was found by Peter Vernon.  All the coins of this reign are quite rare and Peter said this find is only his second in many years of detecting. It’s a nice looking specimen, on which most of the letters in the moneyer’s name are fairly clear. It reads +?hITE, with the first letter uncertain. Leading on from this, I searched for a moneyer whose name had hITE in it. I traced two moneyers with the necessary letters in their name, both were ChITEL; one was an official at the Leicester mint, the other at Norwich.

It was only after I had done the research that I read the rest of Peter’s email. He had already had the coin identified by Dr Martin Allen, who compiles the EMC (Early Medieval Corpus) at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Dr Allen identified the mint as Leicester, presumably because of a die duplicate in the EMC. He told Peter that there were only two similar coins in the EMC and the latest find is the first to be added since the 1990s.

Despite being only the second Norman period coin that Peter has ever found, it could be argued that this cut half is such a nice example that it was well worth the long wait.

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