'A partial manuscript list preserved in the British Library, which was ‘certainly compiled for Sir Robert Cotton and bears entries and annotations in his hand’ (Tite 1992), is entitled:
NUMISMATVM IMPP: ROMANORVM
Regum Britonum Saxonum et Anglor’
a Iulio Caesare ad Iacobum Magnae Bri-
anniae Regem quae in Bibliotheca Cotto-
niana Extant Exemplaria. 1617.
Its pages give a good deal of specific information about Cotton’s coins, using illustrations from Speed’s History, and showing that there was a wide range of ancient British and Roman coins in Cotton’s possession. ...
Unfortunately, the list was never finished. The listing of Roman coins peters out from the early fourth century. There are then some rather faint instructions on subsequent folios, which give indications of what we might have expected for post-Roman material, but they give little specific information:
- f.158v is headed ‘Ffor the monarks from Alfred to William the Conqueror’. The page is otherwise blank;
- f.165r has the heading PAENDRAED for one of its blank boxes;
- at the top of the otherwise blank f.165v we read ‘Saxons to begin her(e). every kingdom to have half a page and Blank left after every several kingdom’. The page is otherwise blank;
- the top of the blank f.166r has ‘From the Conquer. to King James’, followed by nine images from Speed on f.166r and eight on f.166v;
- f.167r has two images, from Speed, of Edward VI and Elizabeth;
- f.168r is headed ‘West Saxon small: on the moneyer’, followed by a list of kings with initial dates, from Ethelred to Ethelwulf, and, at the bottom, the remark ‘Leav(e) 2 or 3 Blankes after every on(e) of thes(e) kingdoms to put in after’;
- f.168v is entitled ‘The Monarkes from Aelfred to the Conqueror’, followed by a list of 17 rulers with initial dates, and three sketches on coin reverses; and
- f.169r is entitled ‘Norman monarkes’, followed by one line of an inscription from coins of William I.
So, although the pages seem now to be in the wrong order, they follow the outline of the work as set out in its title, and give some indication of the later contents it was intended to include. In addition, as well as the list of Saxon kings on f.168r–v, images of 18 coins (numbered 1–23) from William I to Elizabeth have been pasted into two columns drawn exactly like the ones on the earlier pages (but without the boxes).
Each page was ruled with a pencil to form two columns, each of five horizontal boxes, and each box had a little identifying label written in ink; prints of the wood-cuts were then stuck into these boxes as illustrations. These are images cut out from a copy of Speed’s book, or more likely from a proof set of Speed’s images, like the one present in a manuscript volume in the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL MS 116, which once perhaps belonged to Cotton). The grid is not always respected; on f.157v pairs of ancient British coins, which were paired vertically instead of horizontally, have just been stuck over it. Even though the hand has been identified as Cotton’s, it seems that this exercise was not undertaken with a very great knowledge of coins, since sometimes the images were mixed up (Severus and Pescennius; cf. the confusion between the two Theodosii), and similar mistakes presumably explain why so many of the later ones have had their labels corrected. The identification of the coins follows more or less that given by Speed, although there are some mistakes in the labelling. For example, two coins given to ‘Galgacus of Caledonia’ (Speed, p. 177) are labelled Galiagus (sic) and Caliov (sic), implying separate identities.'
(Burnett 2020b, pp. 147-9)
