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Auction: 23004 - Ancient and British Coins - Featuring the 'White Rose' Collection
Lot: 405

Edward the Martyr (975-978), Post-Reform Type, Penny, Cambridge, Hunstan, + EADPEARD REX ANG • diademed and draped bust left, rev. + HVNSTAN M-O GRAN : small cross pattée, 1.68g [26.2grns], 6h (BEH -; SCBI 2, 737; North 763; BMC I; Spink 1143), lightly toned with some striking softness to eye, otherwise a pleasingly bold very fine, an outstanding rarity for the "Corfe Castle Martyr" and one of the earliest issues struck at the Mint of Cambridge after Eadgar's AD 973 monetary reform; recorded from only two examples; that impounded in the Hunterian Museum, and this specimen unstudied since the William Luard Raynes (February 1950) dispersal; an unprecedented 'once in a lifetime' opportunity for the Mint-collecting connoisseur thus

Provenance

W L Raynes, Glendining, 15-17 February 1950, lot 392 - extremely fine, and rare - £26.0.0

B A Seaby, Fixed Price List EH157, 6 February 1931, EH127 - "extremely fine and very rare, a new mint and moneyer for this reign" - £12.10.0

E H Wheeler, Second Collection, sold to Seaby after the disastrous first sale at Sotheby's (12-14 March 1930), by January 1931

Major General Guy Payan Dawnay CB, CMG, DSO, MVO, Sotheby's, 1-3 March 1922, lot 27* - "fine, and apparently a new mint and and moneyer for this reign, though the moneyer is recorded as minting in the same town in the succeeding reign of Aethelred II" - £8.0.0 [Spink for Wheeler]

Col. The Hon. Lewis Payn Dawnay († 30 July 1910), Conservative MP for Thirsk and Malton (1880-1892) and Veteran of the Boer Campaign (1899-1901)




Dawnay's small but impressive cabinet is most marked in its short period of acquisition. From the J W Shaw (1891) to Pollexfen (1900) dispersals, no purchase can firmly be attributed outside of this time on account of his service as a Member of the House of Commons, and curtailed by the Boer War. One exception however is to be found with his sale listing of a Commios' gold Stater recorded 'as found at Basingstoke in the 1880s'. Nevertheless his collecting pattern accords beautifully with his own family history, having inherited money, title and the estate of Beningborough Hall (North Yorks) in 1891, shortly after the death of his young brother fellow MP Guy Cuthbert Dawnay, gored by a wounded buffalo in Mombassa. He and his wife Victoria continued to live part of the year there until his death in 1910, when it passed to their eldest son, Major-General Guy Payan Dawnay, an officer of the General Staff for the fateful Gallipoli campaign, and under whom the collection would eventually be sold through Sotheby's in 1922. Guy Payan Dawnay would be a founding member of the Chatham Dining Club with Rupert Ommaney in 1909, and private financial services group Dawnay Day in 1928. Beningborough would not only afford Dawnay the funds to fulfil his numismatic ambitions in the last decade of the 19th Century, but on the personal account of the family, serve as a joyous retreat where the children were permitted to skate on the pond in winter, play shuttlecock in the gallery and toboggan down the main staircase. Thank goodness Dawnay did not require total tranquillity to place his commission bids!



Hildebrand (1846): "King Eadward the Martyr is the first monarch known to have coined at Cambridge, a Penny of his has GRANT on the reverse - Ruding (1840), i, 132; iii, 157"

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Sold for
£5,500

Starting price
£2500