Liudhard medalet

The Liudhard medalet is a gold Anglo-Saxon coin or small medal found sometime before 1844 near St Martin's Church in Canterbury, England.

The coin is set in a mount so that it could be worn as jewellery, and has an inscription on the obverse or front surrounding a robed figure.

The inscription refers to Liudhard, a Frankish bishop who accompanied Bertha from Francia to England when she married Æthelberht the king of Kent.

The medalet was first revealed to the public on 25 April 1844 by Charles Roach Smith, who presented it, along with other coins found with it, to a meeting of the Numismatic Society.

[3] S. C. Hawkes argues that the eight items in the hoard were found in different graves, basing this on x-ray and fluorescent analysis of the coins.

[1] On the obverse side is a bust of a man wearing a diadem and a robe, with a border of dots around the edge.

Both the initial "L" and terminal "S" of "LEUDARDUS" (Latin for the name "Liudhard") are to some degree shifted sideways on their axes, perhaps to conveniently demarcate between words.

The second grouping, "EPS" (also with identical sideways terminal "S") is a standard abbreviation for the ecclesiastical Latin word EPiscopuS which means bishop.

[6] Smith felt that the legend on the obverse named a 6th-century bishop of Autun, but D. B. Haigh as well as C. H. V. Sutherland, Arthur Evans, and G. C. Brooke all felt that it referred to Liudhard, a Frankish bishop who accompanied the Frankish princess Bertha to the Kingdom of Kent in the late 6th century when the Christian Bertha married the then pagan King Æthelberht of Kent.

The obverse is similar to coins from Merovingian France, especially from the southern parts, as well as showing influences from Visigothic Spain.

[10] The historian Martin Werner argues that the form of the cross on the reverse, with the pendants, is set to resemble the crux gemmata, or jeweled cross, set up in the 4th or 5th century at what was believed to be the site of Golgotha inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Medal of the Emperor Valens (r. 364-78)
A contemporary Frankish gold solidus of Clotaire II , who was a king for his whole life, 584 – 629, mounted as a pendant.