MEROVINGIANS. Tours, St. Maurice. Circa 740-750. Denier (Silver, 10 mm, 0.97 g, 1 h), Erloinus, moneyer. [✠SC]E MΛVR[ICIO] Bare male head (St. Maurice?) to right.
Rev. ✠ERLO[INVS] Cross crossée. Barthélémy (1893), pl. 46, 541 (
this coin illustrated). Belfort -. Depeyrot p. 88, 1 & 3 ( (
this coin cited). Garipzanov (2001), p. 118, 103 (
this coin). Le Gentilhomme (1937), p. 76, no. 4 & pl. IV, 7 (
this coin). Lafaurie (1963), p. 78, 26 (
this coin). Prou 333. Schiesser (2017), 104 (
this coin). Schiesser (2019), p. 359, fig. 4 & 5 (
this coin). Very rare and with a wonderful pedigree, an extensively published coin. Struck off center and the obverse from a somewhat worn die
, otherwise, very fine.
Ex CGB, 24 September 2024, 856723, from the collection of Philippe Schiesser and that of Anatole de Barthélemy (1821-1904) and from the Savonnières Hoard, found in 1865 near Tours, France.
In 1866, an anonymous note in the Annales of the French Numismatic Society (An. Soc. Fr. Num., I (1866), p. 216-217) reported the discovery of a hoard of 45 Merovingian deniers contained in a chalk jar the prior year in the vicinity of Tours. Likely buried around 740, the hoard may have been formed amidst the wars between Hunald I, the Duke of Aquitaine, and Charles Martel and his sons, the Mayors of the Palace.
The hoard was dispersed, with several pieces entering the collection of Gustave Ponton d’Amécourt, who later published eight of them, indicating the find spot as Savonnières. Others were bought by F. Feuardent, who sold six of them to the Cabinet des Médailles. The fate of the remaining pieces remained a mystery, but a manuscript by the French numismatist, Anatole de Barthélemy, donated to the Cabinet des Médailles in 1893, contained line drawings of 3'729 Merovingian coins, indicating those pieces coming from the Savonnières Hoard as being found near Tours. In 1963, Lafaurie managed to reconstruct the hoard in its near entirety.
Subsequently, the present piece has an impressive publication history: first with a line drawing in 1893 and then again with a photo in 1937, after which it was published and cited several times more up to the present day. In 2017, Philippe Schiesser managed to connect the present piece to the manuscript of de Barthélemy, thus securing its old pedigree.
