REVIEW: COINS FROM THE ROYAL BERKSHIRE COLLECTION 13 OCTOBER

Alfred the Great (871-99) underscored his eminent position in the annals of English history once more as a coin from his reign led this sale with a hammer price of £20,000 against an estimate of £6,000-8,000.

An extremely fine penny, as can be seen in the accompanying illustration, it had a provenance to notable collections dating back more than a century.

At a more than double-top-estimate £7,500, an extremely rare halfpenny of Eadgar (959-975) came next, while an Alfred the Great halfpenny, also extremely rare, left a high estimate of £1,800 behind to take £5,500.

That was the same hammer price as a Pax type penny of Harold II (1066) from the Wallingford mint – almost double the top estimate – which was found in 1914 near Sudbury in Suffolk “on the Essex side of the Stour”.