One has only to look at the Dorking hoard (Dolley, SCBI vm, 21) to be satisfied that towards the end of his reign Æthelwulf of Wessex (839–58), a monarch increasingly susceptible to Continental influences, standardised the type of the West Saxon penny so that henceforth all moneyers operating at any one time produced coins identical except for their reverse legends. It is clear, too, that a beginning at least was made with the withdrawal from currency of earlier issues, though obviously such policies could not be imposed on those parts of England where Æthelwulf had no jurisdiction. It is likely, too, that Danish incursions into Wessex at least as late as the 870s may further smudge the pattern where the evidence of the coin hoards as such is concerned.

Æthelwulf's ‘reform’ penny (Table 13, fig. A) appears to have been current for the first few years of the next reign, during which coins were struck with precisely the same types but substituting the name of Æthelbearht (858–66). The second of Æthelwulf's surviving sons, he either controlled or had access to mints at Canterbury, London and Rochester, and so exercised a monopoly denied to his older brother Æthelbeald, inasmuch as the Viking attack of 842 had knocked out Southampton which alone lay within the latter's share of the temporarily partitioned kingdom.