The coin illustrated is a silver penny from the reign of William I (1066-1087). We remember William as the conquering king, the man who as Duke of Normandy landed on the south coast of England and in the battle of Hastings defeated and killed the English king Harold II. He sought to impose his authority on his newly won kingdom, suppressing several uprisings and conducting in 1086 the massive survey of the ownership, value and extent of the lands of England that came to be known as the Domesday Book.
The strong central control that he exercised was also reflected in the way in which the coinage was managed. From the time of King Edgar (959-975) there had been a unified currency system operating in England, consisting of a network of local mints spread across the country striking silver pennies to a single design and weight standard. It was a system that proved to be robust enough to survive economic change and the conquest of 1066, and William I built on this firm central control of the currency.
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Towards the end of his reign the silver penny had become heavier and, contrary to the variations which had occurred in previous reigns, it then remained at the same weight for the next two centuries. Consistently uniform at 22.5 grains, this English, or more accurately Norman, penny gained a deserved reputation abroad as a fixed and reliable currency. Professor Philip Grierson has argued convincingly that the Middle English word ster, meaning rigid or fixed, came to be applied to the English silver penny by demonstrating that the earliest references to sterling pennies in Continental documents, all of them significantly post-Conquest, used the word sterling as an adjective in precisely this sense.
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