As this is the first notice in this venue of the series of Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles (SCBI), of which the volume under review is the fiftieth, it seems worthwhile to begin with a few words about the series itself and its potential interest to medievalists not specialized in numismatics. Modeled on the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum for ancient Greek coinage, the series adopts a format in which a maximum number of coins can be illustrated by photographs in a reasonably compact and affordable book. Commentary is restricted to an introductory section, and brief, tabular descriptions of the coins are on pages facing the plates. The current volume includes over 1500 coins, virtually all previously unpublished, in a book that can easily be opened on a table alongside coins and other volumes. For a detailed discussion on the development of early English coinage, one can now turn to Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage (MEC), Vol. 1, The Early Middle Ages (5th-10th Centuries), (Cambridge, 1986). For later centuries, one must still consult the nineteenth-century catalogues of the British Museum and monographic literature while awaiting the publication of volumes 8 and 9 of MEC.
The SCBI series was initiated in 1958 by C. E. Blunt and M. Dolley, and under the able and enthusiastic direction of Mark Blackburn for the past two decades has achieved an enviable consistency of quality and regularity of output. The emphasis has been chiefly on medieval coinage, and within this mainly Anglo-Saxon. Of the four major public British collections, the British Museum is represented by volumes 8 (Hiberno-Norse coins) and 35 (Athelstan to Edgar's Reform); the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, by vol. 1 (Ancient British and Anglo-Saxon coins); the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, by vols. 9 (Anglo-Saxon pennies), 12 (English coins 1066-1279), 23 (Coins of Henry VII), and 35 (Scottish coins-together with those of the Hunterian Museum); and the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, by vol. 2 (Anglo-Saxon coins).
Certain of the volumes in the SCBI series are of special interest to historians of the Middle Ages for the information they provide on English coins discovered in Baltic contexts. Finds of Anglo-Saxon coins throughout the Baltic regions, alongside Islamic and German issues, appear to reflect a major historical phenomenon, but one whose significance will only be clear once all of the data are gathered and published. A convenient introduction to these finds and the questions associated with them is the collection of articles edited by Mark Blackburn and D. M. Metcalf, Viking-Age Coinage in the Northern Lands, The Sixth Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, 2 vols., BAR International Series 122 (Oxford, 1981). In general terms, hoards point to a large- scale importation of Islamic silver coins mainly in the ninth and tenth centuries, followed by a significant presence of Anglo-Saxon and German coins of the late tenth and the first half of the eleventh century. Finds of these issues are spread throughout the Baltic region and continental Poland and Russia, with the highest concentration in Sweden, especially on the island of Gotland. For the English component, Gotland hoards account for 41% of the 57,000 coins found, with the rest of Sweden comprising about 10%, Denmark 24%, Norway 6%, Finland 2%, the West Slav lands 8%, and the East Slav lands 10% (Blackburn and Metcalf, p. 149).
The Swedish finds are being published in their entirety in a series of volumes organized by the find-place of the coins under the title of Corpus Nummorum Saeculorum IX-XI qui in Suecia Reperti Sunt (CNS); nine of the projected 30 volumes have appeared since 1975. For other regions, the publications in the SCBI series offer an introduction to the Viking-Age coin finds by detailing the history of the English coins that have made their way into national collections. Among these are the Royal Collection, Copenhagen (SCBI 4, 7, 13, 14, 15, 18, 22); the National Museum, Helsinki (SCBI 25); the State Museum, Berlin, with pieces found in Slavic lands formerly under German rule (SCBI 36); Polish museums (SCBI 37); and Latvian collections (SCBI 45). The Royal Coin Cabinet, Stockholm, is also publishing its Anglo-Saxon coins in the SCBI format, but only the relatively small percentage of them from the reigns of Harold I and Harthacnut are published in SCBI 40; the remainder are expected to take many more volumes.
The volume under review here, Anglo-Saxon coins before 1016 in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, represents a most welcome addition to both the SCBI series in general and to those volumes representing Baltic area finds of the Viking Age. The volume is the work of Vsevolod Potin, for many years the Director of the Hermitage Numismatic Department and the preeminent modern scholar of medieval coinage in Russia. In his preface, Potin acknowledges the major role of Mark Blackburn and William Lean in preparing the catalogue for press. With scholars of this stature, there can be little question as to the care and accuracy of the cataloguing represented here. The volume follows the general format of the SCBI series, with the minor variations found in other volumes. In this catalogue, mint and minter's name are given as on the coin as well as in standard form, but there is no indication of the number of pecks or bends (evidences of ancient testing of the alloy). Die identities are given to other examples within the collection, but to coins of other collections and publications only in the case of fragmentary or defaced coins when necessary for identification. Coins are arranged within each reign by chronological issue rather than by mint as in some earlier catalogues. The photographs are uneven in quality but for the most part adequate for study.
This volume, the first of four projected for the Hermitage, includes a conspectus of nineteen hoards of Anglo-Saxon coins represented in the collection, which include finds from Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine. Unfortunately, only a small number of coins from these finds can be identified with specimens in the Hermitage collection, while most of the coins illustrated in the volume are entirely unprovenanced or can be traced back only to nineteenth century collections, especially those of Jacob Reichel and the Stroganov family. Of the 1,204 coins of Aethelred II (978-1016) listed here, only 179 can be traced back to hoards; these numbers can be compared with a total of 948 coins in his name reported in 37 published Russian hoards (Kluge in Blackburn and Metcalf, pp. 311-315). No doubt many coins from the published finds (and from other unpublished Russian ones as well) are represented in this catalogue, but it is impossible to determine which.
This volume maintains the high standards of the series and, when the other volumes are in print, the medieval English coins in the Hermitage will be published more fully than any other numismatic series in that collection. In general, the patient work of the editors of the SCBI series and of its individual volumes has brought Anglo-Saxon coinage to a level of publication that is a paragon not only for medieval coinage, but for medieval collections of every sort.