Witmen Tremissis: Bust and Trident (obverse); Cross Fourchée (reverse) (early 600s): Art, History and Details

Witmen Tremissis: Bust and Trident (obverse); Cross Fourchée (reverse) (early 600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Crondall Hoard is a hoard of coins that was found in 1828 in the village of Crondall in the English county of Hampshire. It is believed to date to the seventh century and was studied by Dr. Carol Humphrey Vivian Sutherland (1908-1986), an English numismatist. He characterized this coin as being a close copy of the Witmen prototype, the most common type found in the hoard. Witmen, or his design, featuring a bust on one side and a cross on the other, seems to have been very popular and remained popular for many years. During this time however the portraits grew cruder and cruder, the legends became even more blundered, and the gold content fell lower and lower.

Object facts

• Title: Witmen Tremissis: Bust and Trident (obverse); Cross Fourchée (reverse)
• Date: early 600s
• Culture: England, Anglo-Saxon, early 7th century
• Type: Coins
• Technique: gold
• Dimensions: Diameter: 1.1 cm (7/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Numismatics
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1969.159

A detail from the museum

The tremissis was a small solid gold coin of late antiquity and was a third of a solidus.

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Emery May Norweb. English Gold Coins, Ancient to Modern Times, On Loan to the Cleveland Museum of Art from the Norweb Collection. [Catalog. 1968.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.