Penny - Ceolnoth Group I

Ceolnoth served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 833 until his death in 870, a tenure that spanned the most destructive phase of Viking raiding on England — including the sack of Canterbury itself in 851. The ecclesiastical minting privilege exercised here was not exceptional for the period; Canterbury had operated its own dies since at least the late eighth century. What makes Group I attributable as a distinct issue is primarily die-linkage work done by modern scholarship, separating early from later productions within his long archiepiscopate on stylistic and metrology grounds.