Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 4.djvu/43

Rh from Tag a prince, and that it represented the idea tax in Celtic, and the equivalent of the Latin taxatio, a word indeed barbarous enough, but derived from the Greek. The subject lay dormant in this state for some time, till Dr. Pegge, a man of some classical learning and attainments, wrote his dissertation, embodying all the notions of his predecessors, and critically examining their historical pretensions: he even classified the coins into five divisions; 1. those with the king's name full or abbreviated; 2. those with name and place of coinage; 3. those with Tascia full or abridged; 4. those with Tascia only; 5. those with Tascia and place of coinage. He still continued, however, to confound the legends altogether, and even wavered whether CUN might not mean Cunetio or Marlborough: but it is due to Pegge to state that he established something like order in his system, and classed the Tascia and Ver together, which last he rightly called Verulamium, or St. Alban's, while he identified Cam with Camalodunum or Colchester, which has been subsequently confirmed by the reading of two coins. The complete legends of Tasciovani• f• he does not appear to have seen. The legend Tascio or Tascia, for both occur, he supposed to be the name of King Cunobelin's moneyer, which he supported by the fact of the names of moneyers occurring on coins of Augustus. Although this interpretation was not correct, there was in it thus far an approach to truth, that the coins were distinctly assigned to Britain, and that they were supposed to be copied after a Roman model. The opinions of writers continued to oscillate between the hypotheses of Wise, Pettingal, and Pegge, as late as the appearance of the work of Ruding, although that writer, and his successors, as I have already stated, possessed ample means of rectifying the errors of preceding enquiries, and had in fact all the elements of the true reading. Even the cold and accurate Combe, in his Catalogue of the Museum, misread the legend of No. 4, and thus continued to perpetuate the notion that some inexplicable enigma lay hid in the word Tasciovanit. Yet the Museum specimen is remarkably distinct, and on another type in the Museum, reading TAZCIIOVANIIF, if the last letter could not have been necessarily identified as an F at all events it was not a T. Whitaker in his History of Manchester, a book of rather apocryphal character, had however proposed another theory, to which it will be necessary to refer, as it has