‘Coins handsome as Nero's; of good substance and weight. Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers. They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king's face.’ So does the poet Geoffrey Hill in his Mercian Hymns, having memorably hailed Offa as ‘overlord of the M5’, describe his coinage (xi). These lines capture something of the essence of this spectacular coinage: its beauty, fineness, variety and the complexities of its minting. The Coinage of Offa and His Contemporaries, a handsomely produced and illustrated volume, manages to do the same – and much more. The audiences this work addresses are wide, and range from numismatists to historians, including economic historians and art historians, and from archaeologists to linguists.

The genesis of this volume is complex: at its core are the data gathered over several decades by Derek Chick, an expert coin conservator and keen numismatist with a particular interest in Offa's coinage. Because of his work, Chick was in touch with coin dealers and metal-detector users and quickly gained their confidence, so that he was among the first to hear of new finds and confidential details of findspots. He collected these data meticulously, weights and measurements together with images and plaster casts, and was generous in sharing information with other scholars and prompt in reporting finds. Chick became a well-respected authority on the period, publishing and giving papers on Offa's coins since the early 1990s. Work on what he intended to be a comprehensive study of the coins of the period was halted in 2002 at the untimely death of his wife. He then decided to donate his card index and archive to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This is no coincidence, and could not have been a happier choice: Mark Blackburn, FSA, since 1991 Keeper of Coins and Medals at the Museum, had long known, encouraged and supported Derek Chick.

The volume is introduced by the reprinting and updating of two of Chick's seminal articles based on papers given in 1995 in Cambridge and 2000 in Manchester (Chick Reference Chick1997 and Reference Chick2005) as well as a reconsideration by Mark Blackburn of the so-called ‘Offa Sceat’. One of the key issues of the book is the working towards the establishment of a chronology and mint attribution for the period. Thanks to the great number of specimens retrieved through the use of metal detectors in recent years, die-linking and stylistic considerations have greatly increased our understanding of the coinage and made possible the study of its relative size.

A corpus of 728 coins forms the core of the publication. The coinage is divided by metal (gold and silver), and within the larger silver section two main phases of a Light and a Heavy coinage are identified. Within these, the coins are grouped by mints and rulers, and further subdivided by moneyers and types/variants. Each entry gives a description, information on current location, find context, references to publications and databases given, as well as weights and other physical data, plus any die-links. Moreover, each type is illustrated life-size by a representative specimen in the margin, a welcome innovation offering immediate engagement with the iconographic richness of the coinage, and, bar very few unavoidable exceptions, all specimens are illustrated over twenty-nine plates. The catalogue is further supported by a number of scholarly appendices, tables and concordances of great interest and by a rich bibliography.

This book is just one of the many publications that came to fruition in the months preceding Mark Blackburn's much-lamented death on 1 September 2011. Mark took over Chick's legacy with typical vigour and scholarly leadership: he recognized its value and ensured that its publication would be respectful of Chick's contribution, but also totally modern in its updating and perspective. The genesis of the volume, which Mark details in the Foreword, affords us a glimpse of his style and modus operandi. Reading about how the work took shape we become aware of Mark the leader, of the importance of the interactions and fruitful networks he had established with colleagues and people beyond strictly academic circles, particularly metal-detector users, of his clear sense of direction and ability in identifying worthwhile projects (and getting them funded!), and of his acute awareness of the impact of numismatic findings well beyond the discipline. These are all qualities that contributed to make the Fitzwilliam Coin Room under his leadership a hive of activities and an intellectual powerhouse.

Above all, we recognize Mark the man, as a kind and genuine friend and teacher. In discussing this publication, one is moved to comment on the sensitivity in the handling and arranging of Chick's material, and on the thoroughness of the scholarly approach taken. This is also due to Mark's felicitous choice of Rory Naismith as his student and research assistant. Rory dedicated years of careful work and painstaking research to this project and under Mark's guidance he has developed into a most accomplished young numismatist. Mark remarked with pleasure on the fruitful legacy of Derek Chick's work: it is good to recognize what an immensely rich legacy Mark's own contributions to numismatic studies have left.

This is a very fine numismatic work, which sets really high standards. As Offa no doubt would have said: ‘I liked that, sing it again …’. In this case, one cannot but recommend another of Rory Naismith's companion publications: Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England (2012).