Exhibition to feature medieval coin dating back to 1024
Pointed Helmet type. - Credit: Roger Mould
An exhibition planned for April will feature a recently acquired medieval coin handed to the Ramsey Abbey Community Archaeology Project.
Roger Mould, team leader Warboys Archaeology Group and Ramsey Abbey Community Archaeology Project, was handed a medieval coin in September 2020 by a retired head of history teacher called Barry Williams, at Abbey College in Ramsey.
Short Cross Side - Credit: Roger Mould
The Ramsey Abbey Community Archaeology Project has an exhibition called ‘Treasures of Ramsey Abbey’ which it hopes to open on April 3 at the Norris Museum, St Ives with an information area at Ramsey Library.
The coin found and other items will be held on display at the exhibition.
Roger decided to find out more about the coin so he contacted the medieval coin specialists at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, emailing them with two pictures of it.
He said: “Their reply showed that they knew of the coin and it had been recorded in their on-line Corpus of early medieval coin finds as EMC1966.0001 but they had never seen a photograph or the actual coin.”
After the Ramsey Abbey Community Archaeology Project investigated further, they discovered that in 1966, the coin, called a ‘Pointed Helmet type’, was found about 30 centimetres deep in the school grounds, by an eleven-year-old student, Gary Richardson, of what was then Ramsey Modern School.
Hunts Post Article from 1966 - Credit: Roger Mould
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At first Gary thought he had found a sixpence, but as he wiped the dirt from the coin he realised that it wasn’t a sixpence and he showed it to a member of staff.
The coin was then identified by the head of the history, as a ‘King Cnut silver penny.’
The coin had been minted in York by the moneyer Cetel, sometime between 1024 to 1030 and it somehow it had found it’s way to Ramsey Abbey.
The final artist impression of the complete tile then allows viewers to see what the medieval folk would have seen over 500 years ago. The clay tile would have had been covered with a lead glaze before firing, usually dark brown, dark green or black but could also be, more rarely, yellow. - Credit: Roger Mould
The Ramsey Abbey Community Archaeology Project will also unveil at the exhibition for the first time in just over five hundred years, an artist’s impression of a completed Tudor Rose clay tile composed of catalogued sherds of medieval relief tiles associated with Ramsey Abbey.
To find out more about the exhibition or research email: r.abbeycp@hotmail.com
