1 Penny - Henry II Tealby coinage, class A

The Tealby coinage takes its name from a hoard of roughly 5,000 pennies unearthed at Tealby, Lincolnshire in 1807 — the largest find of Henry II silver to date, and still the primary reference point for classifying the type's early classes. Henry's recoinage of 1158 was driven by the degraded state of Stephen's issues, which had been struck by a chaotic proliferation of baronial and ecclesiastical mints during the Anarchy. Class A represents the opening emission of that reform, struck at multiple authorized mints before the Crown began tightening control over provincial output.

Dies of this class are notoriously poorly cut, and the coins are almost universally found weakly defined — not a strike problem per se, but a product of rushed engraving to meet immediate demand.