ABSTRACT
Mark Blackburn was born on 5 January 1953 in Camberley, Surrey. He grew up there and in Tonbridge Wells, Kent, where he attended the Skinners’ School. In 1971 he went up to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, reading chemistry and later jurisprudence. His studies paved the way for a career in the law, and in September 1975 he was called to the bar at Middle Temple. Aer three years, Mark le the law and took up a position with the merchant banking rm Kleinwort Benson Ltd, where he remained until 1982. In that year he made an important decision: to pursue professionally what had previously been an abiding personal interest in numismatics. Mark had had an interest in coins and their interpretation since his school days, but a more academic approach was prompted by Stewart Lyon’s 1970 presidential review in the British Numismatic Journal, where he lamented the shortage of researchers on the series.3 Mark responded to this appeal, and published his rst scholarly work on Anglo-Saxon and Norman coinage while still an undergraduate in Oxford.4 By the early 1980s he was an established authority among the small fraternity of numismatists who had turned their attention to Anglo-Saxon and related coinages in the decades since the Second World War. Professor Michael Dolley and Dr Stewart Lyon in particular encouraged Mark’s numismatic studies, and soon became close friends as well as respected colleagues.
