'I resolv’d to have given you my thanks for your Last by the Carrier; who is now gone, & will be at Oxford before I have gotten Leisure (or Inclination, for the cold weather had made me very Lazy) to sett pen to paper. Mr Gibson tells me that Camden is now finish’d. I long to see it: chiefly upon the Score of the great Improvements you have made in your own Countrey. I confess I am not yet wholly reconciled to your opinion of the Coins (with Inscriptions in Latin Characters) being truly Brittish. How came either Cassibelane or Cunobeline so early acquainted with the Roman Letters. Besides; The Inscriptions are in Conformity to the Names given them by Julius Caesar and Tacitus, who certainly blunder’d in the true Spelling. I should rather expect to hear of Mandubratius’s Coin thus inscrib’d then Cassivellaun’s. And why not Kymbeline and Kaswalhawn, according to your true Brittish Orthography, rather than Cunobeline and Cassibelane? Why Cunobeline’s in Latin Letters and his Son Adminius’s in Greek? To be free with you – I think most of the Guesses we have had about these Coins are much of the same complexion with the grave Remark of Sr John Pettus; who (in the Glossary to his Fleta minor) tells us that the word Coin comes from Coynobeline, who was the first Brittish King that stamp’d money. Not but that I am still teachable enough; and am far from resolving to shut my eyes against the Day-light.'
(Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1816, ff.476-7; Burnett 2020b, p. 1553; transcription in EMLO by Helen Watt and Brynley Roberts)
