Penny anonymous St. Edmund Memorial coinage

Edmund, King of East Anglia, was killed by the Great Heathen Army in 869 — bound to a tree, shot with arrows, and beheaded — and was venerated as a martyr almost immediately. This coinage, struck by anonymous moneyers across the Danelaw roughly fifteen to forty years after his death, is historically extraordinary: a pagan-controlled territory producing coins commemorating a Christian king its own rulers had killed. The Danes who now governed East Anglia apparently found the cult of Edmund too politically entrenched to suppress, and possibly useful to legitimize their own administration.

Output from multiple moneyers working across different centers means die links within the series are complex and still not fully resolved.