May 31^st 2022.

Next club meeting Monday 6^th June 2022.

· Annual General Meeting and Display Competition

Monday 4^th July 2022.

· Varieties in Milled coinage - Where to draw the line By Mick Martin

August 2022.

· Summer Social – TBC - tour of numismatic sites in the City of London

Meetings are held at the Abbey Baptist Church, Abbey Square, commencing at 7.00 p.m.

Notices

The club's AGM and Annual display Competition for the Michael Broome Cup is the meeting where the officers report the status of the club and the membership voice their concerns/ideas. It is also the time where the club committee is elected for the forthcoming year and time to renew your membership.

As last year, with this newsletter is a single Committee Report with contributions from all the officers and the financial balance sheet (appended at the end of this newsletter). We will not be repeating the content verbatim at the meeting. After the formalities, the agenda points that the Committee requires membership feedback will be discussed. Then there will be the opportunity for members to raise any issues, so please take time to read the report and gather your thoughts prior to the meeting. The election of officers will follow.

If you are willing to stand for election to the Committee please contact the secretary at the number at the top of this newsletter.

The second part of the evening will be devoted to the annual display competition, with the winner being awarded the Michael Broome Memorial Trophy for 1 year. Please bear in mind that all the displays should be treated respectfully, these are members own pieces and all should be handled carefully. The competition is open to all members and can cover any topic connected to numismatics. So to all members, please have a go and enter a display.

Because the formalities of the AGM now take very little time, there WILL be some time available at the end of the meeting for dealing but ONLY AFTER the Display Competition has finished. Dealers can put their coins out but should COVER THEM till the competition has completed. Note that Displays have priority over the use of tables.

May Meeting

Apologies were received from Tony, Neil, Ian and Martin.

David Guest from CNG (Classical Numismatic Group) came to give us a talk on the Goddard or Maine penny. This intriguing coin may or may not be proof of the Vikings having visited North America centuries before Columbus. He explained how he came to be so interested in this one coin, but first looked at the state of coin collecting.

At CNG there has been a huge upturn in interest in the Coin Market since Lockdown and he gave several reasons why this might be the case, supply and demand, existing collectors suddenly having spare time, quantitative easing putting more money into circulation, interest rates for savers being historically low and now inflation picking up, the uncertainties in the World with events such as the War in Ukraine leading to hoarding even a ‘fear of missing out’. This leads people to invest in tangible items such as gold. As collectors we are aware of the many motives for coin collecting but one we may not of given much thought to was escapism. Coins allow us to escape the here and now and travel through time!

David then showed us a slide of a Silver Penny of Olaf the Peaceful of Norway issued somewhere between 1067 and 1093 that had recently came in for auction. Olaf was the son of Harald Hardrada the ‘Last Great Viking’ who was killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 whilst attempting to invade Britain. Olaf was far more inclined to negotiation than his father who was famous for his belligerent ways. The vast majority of Olaf’s coins known today come from a hoard of over 2200 pieces discovered in 1878 in Gresli, Norway. The design of the penny may have been loosely based on the English penny design of the time with a short cross on one side. He revealed that part of his interest stemmed from a book he had rescued from the ‘pulp’ pile in a previous job at a publisher, it was the Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings.

He next showed us a slide of the Goddard Penny itself. The coin is in very poor condition and is believed to have been pierced at some point and the pierced part broken off. It was discovered by Guy Mellgren, an amateur archeologist who was studying a dig near his home in 1957. It was initially identified as an English penny, possibly from Stephen’s reign in the 12^th Century and was eventually donated to the Maine State Museum in 1974. It was not correctly identified until 1978 (by our old alumni Peter Seaby) and was featured on the front of Seaby’s Coin and Medal magazine in 1978, just three months after Mellgren’s death. It was authenticated by Professor Kolbjorn Skaare of Oslo in February 1979. There had been intense interest in proving a pre-Columbian ‘discovery’ of North America by Vikings, so the discovery of a genuine Viking coin in North America was big news and the story was picked up by World Coin News, National Geographic, The New York Times and TIME to name but a few. However, there had been several finds of ‘Viking’ coins over the years, all of which turned out to be false and there remained a problem with this coin as to how it got to America.

Several things seemed to support the idea that the coin had been planted, for example a later dig at the site failed to turn up any other coins or Viking artefacts. Mellgren himself was of Nordic descent and a coin collector, so presumably could have had access to such a coin, probably from the Gresli hoard, further there was no entry in his journal reporting the date of the discovery at the dig. Mellgren gave a paper at a conference on pre-Columbian contacts with North America in 1974 and failed to mention the Goddard penny. The possibility that the coin was from the Newfoundland Viking settlements is difficult to believe since the coin postdates the settlement by 150 years. Indeed no Viking coins are known at the Newfoundland settlements, or in Greenland, only a few in Iceland and the Faroes.

In 2005 Dr. Edmund Carpenter reviewed all the data about the penny and declared the case for it being genuine was ‘Not Proven’. This has remained the ‘official’ verdict on the coin being evidence of Vikings in North America.

Recently, Garry Oddie made David aware by of a paper published in 1979 in which Maurice Robbins gave a possible explanation of Mellgren’s involvement –

‘Knowing the coin to be pre-Columbian, either English or Norse, he kept very quiet about the find. The professional world is so opposed to anything Viking in the Northeast that, if an amateur claims to have found something of Viking origin, he is immediately suspect... [Regarding the 1974 conference:] The find was known at that time by several of us but to protect Guy we did not bring it up.’

David then went on to list some of the possibilities for the arrival of the coin in North America. Firstly, it could be totally genuine and left behind by Vikings, secondly it could have been an accidental loss by traders visiting the site who had been using it as a piece of jewelery, especially as it had been pierced. David’s favourite theory was that it had been carried to the site by a bird, possibly an Albatross or somesuch. Then of course, it could be a hoax by Mellgren himself or – a hoax played on Mellgren. In a final twist to the tale, David revealed that a more recent numismatic investigation of the penny by Gullbeck revealed it to be a variety that was not present in the Gresli hoard, meaning that it would have been much harder for anyone to have obtained it to plant at the dig. So the jury is still out on this one.

What of the penny that David had in his auction? It went for $4,000, way over the initial estimate of $1000! Thank you to David for a fascinating talk and maybe he’ll comeback to tell us if the origin of the coin is ever truly discovered.

Future Events.

· London Coin Fair at Holiday Inn, Bloomsbury 11^th June

· Midland Coin Fair – National Motorcycle Museum 12^th June

Past Events

• 10 years ago – “English Medieval Jetons” - P Mernick

· 20 years ago – “Countermarked Coins” – Gavin Scott

· 50 years ago – “A History of Banknotes” – Michael O’Grady

Club Secretary.

READING COIN CLUB
INCOME AND EXPENDITURE ACCOUNT
	Year to		Year to
	30 April 2022		30 April 2021
	£	£	£	£
Income
Subscriptions		55.00
Auction Commission Sales	1,857.00
Costs	- 1,667.70	189.30		-
Donations & raffle		56.00		-
Bank Interest		0.24		0.52
		300.54		0.52
Expenditure
Room hire		385.00
Speakers' expenses		50.00
Computing, printing, postage & stationery		103.50		110.10
BANS/ BNS subscriptions		37.00		37.00
Library		-		-
Skittles cost	-
income	-	-		-
Xmas Buffet & refreshments		26.02
Winter Social - cost	-
- income	-	-		-
Depreciation of fixed assets		50.00		100.00
		651.52		247.10
Surplus (Loss) for the Year		- 350.98		- 246.58
BALANCE SHEET
	30 April 2022		30 April 2021
Fixed Assets
Library, Cabinet & Computer, Projector	182.00		282.00
Less depreciation	- 50.00	132.00	- 100.00	182.00
Current Assets
Bank current account	552.41		853.63
Bank deposit account	2,203.87	2,756.28	2,203.63	3,057.26
Sundry creditors		-		-
Assets		2,888.28		3,239.26
Represented by:
Revenue Reserve
Balance brought forward		3,239.26		3,485.84
Surplus (- Deficit) for year		- 350.98		- 246.58
Balance carried forward		2,888.28		3,239.26