#FindsFriday: Missing Ozengell coin?
It's #FindsFriday and our curator Andy has been doing a bit of detective work to trace a "missing" coin from the Ozengell Anglo-Saxon collection.
When the society purchased the collection in 2022 (https://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/news/society-purchases-the-ozengell-anglo-saxon-collection), we began the painstaking work of cataloguing all of the items given to us by Rosebery's London. In one of the boxes we found a package which simply stated Ag Coin - sent to Ashmolean Museum, '88. Not a particularly helpful description.
Having checked with the Ashmolean it was confirmed that they did not have the coin so we were back to square one!
Thanks to Dr Sue Harrington who provided Andy with a wealth of research from her own investigations into the Ozengell collection from the early 2000s we had a new lead. Guy Granger who had led the excavations alongside Dr Dave Perkins had mentioned in an email to Sue, that the coin had been sold at auction around 1998. This email stated it was a Merovingian coin from grave 222, so we were now one step closer to its identity.
A search of the Fitzwilliam online collections for Ozengell didn't return any results. However, Merovingian returned only two options; a coin discovered in 2010 and a Denier of Childeric II (662-75 AD0 acquired by an unknown person in 1996). Could this be our missing coin?
Andy has double checked against the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds. Again, the records don't fully match up as the EMC Record (1988.0102) describes the coin as an anonymous Merovingian Denier minted in Tours, however it says it was found in 1876!
The images on both object records match (BY-NC-ND), but it appears there is some confusion as to whether this coin was recovered during the 1976 - 1982 excavations or the earlier 19th century discoveries during the railway expansion.
We are waiting on more information from the Fitzwilliam so hopefully there acquisition records will provide confirmation!
The Fitzwilliam Museum (2025) "Medieval" Web page available at: https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/135300 Accessed: 2025-04-11 12:43:33.
