SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: A recent discovery of coins suggests that the date of the foundation of Croydon as a strategic location between London and Canterbury was more than 150 years earlier than historians had previously suggested, writes DAVID MORGAN

Golden history: this coin, with the head of Coenwulf, provides a link to Croydon going back more than a thousand years
It took an intervention from a friend who is a numismatist to further extend my knowledge of the history of Croydon Minster.
“Have you ever seen these coins before?” he asked, showing me a picture of two coins, one gold, one silver.
“You want to look carefully at them because the two people whose portraits are on the coins came to Croydon Minster. The gold coin has the head of Coenwulf on it, the King of Mercia, and the silver one has the head of Archbishop Wulfred, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“An Anglo-Saxon charter which was signed by both these men was drawn up ‘iuxta monasterium quod dicitur Crogedena’… translated that means next to the Minster in Croydon.”
So I was left to follow up these revelations. Continue reading