Thank you for the kind remarks!
Carausius, I do not have any particular personal connection to Northumbria. My wife actually has some family in the region, but that wasn't really my motivation. I've spent time in
England, studying, and like the country and its
history. I have a particular fondness for
Anglo-Saxon coins. I would collect pennies of Mercia and
Kent if they were not so
rare and expensive.
I decided to focus on Northumbrian coins because they are old, unusual, and less expensive
per coin than other Anglo-Saxon issues. You can
still find unidentified stycas on
eBay and other venues. They are fairly plentiful compared to other
contemporary issues, and metal detectorists not uncommonly pluck them out of the ground. The coins themselves are not spectacular looking. Most of them have fairly basic designs, the name of a
king on one
side, the name of a moneyer on the other. There are not a
ton of collectors, certainly not in the
United States. Demand is relatively soft. I feel like a
complete set of every
styca (
king and moneyer) is possible to put together without being a millionaire. My
collection has grown by a decent amount recently, partly because of the sale of the
Peter Moffat
collection via
CNG. I don't know anything about Mr. Moffat, but he put together what is probably the largest
collection of Northumbrian coins outside of
museum collections. I was fortunate to obtain several items out of these sales. There must have been over 1000 coins that were sold over the course of a couple of years. It was a
scale of collecting reminiscent of
Lockett or Lord Grantley, which is unlikely to be duplicated nowadays.
I will say that Northumbrian sceats and stycas are not the most inviting series of coin to start collecting. Some of the major references are out of print and difficult to obtain, and even then are quite difficult to understand. The die link chart/table in Pirie's "Coins of the Kingdom of Northumbria" is overly complex reminds me of vector calculus or some other unpleasant college level mathematics.
For anyone who is interested in learning more about these coins, I recommend starting with
BNJ 28: A reappraisal of the sceatta and
styca coinage of Northumbria. It's available (free!) at the
Digital BNJ Archive.Other references that are useful are:
"Sceatta List + Stycas Simplified" by Tony
Abramson"Coins of the Kingdom of Northumbria" by E.J. Pirie (the
standard work, but quite difficult to follow and much of her categorizing of these coins has been rejected by other numismatic scholars)
"Coinage in Ninth Century Northumbria,
BAR:180 (British series)" ed D.M.
Metcalf (lots of
good info, slightly dated, very difficult to find a copy of this
work. If you can't find it Mr.
Abramson summarizes the major articles in
his Stycas Simplified book)