History of the English penny (c. 600-1066)
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The history of the English penny can be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
of the 7th century: to the small, thick silver coins known to contemporaries as pæningas or denarii
, though now often referred to as sceattas
by numismatists. Broader, thinner pennies inscribed with the name of the king were introduced to southern England in the middle of the 8th century. Coins of this format remained the foundation of the English currency until the 14th century.
coinage spans more than five centuries, from the end of Roman rule in Britain in the 5th century, down to the death of Harold Godwinson
at the Battle of Hastings
on 14 October 1066. It can be divided into four basic phases:
In the gold phase of the coinage, the currency consisted overwhelmingly of gold tremisses or thrymsas of c. 1.10–1.30g, though a few solidi
exist, modelled on Roman
coins. Thereafter the currency was more or less based on a single denomination: the silver penny. In the early 870s the first round halfpennies were produced under Alfred the Great
and Ceolwulf II of Mercia
; these were produced sporadically and in small quantity until Edgar’s reform of the 970s, after which it became common to cut whole pennies into halves and quarters, often at the time of production. The only known examples of larger silver denominations are two ‘offering pieces’ produced in the reign of Alfred the Great
weighing the equivalent of six regular pennies, which were made as alms-pieces, probably to be sent abroad.
Although gold ceased to be the predominant form of currency in the 7th century, from the late 8th century onwards there was some use of fine gold coinage for special, high-value transactions. These gold pieces were often known as mancus
es. The form of gold coinage varied in the 8th and 9th centuries, drawing inspiration from Roman, Byzantine, Arabic and Carolingian gold coinages, but by the 10th century gold coins were made simply by striking a gold piece with the same dies as were used for regular minting of silver. Only eight English gold coins with intelligible legends survive from between the 8th century and 1066; there are also some coins that may or may not be of English origin which bear no legend, and specimens of contemporary foreign gold found in England.
It is difficult to ascertain the nature and extent of coin-use in Anglo-Saxon England. Written references to minting and money are scarce, and it is likely that even a single silver penny had considerable buying power – perhaps something in the region of £10–£30 in modern currency. Their use may also have been concentrated in certain classes of society, and was probably most associated with particular transactions such as the payment of rents, tributes and legal fees. However, analysis of surviving single-finds (principally made since the 1970s by users of metal-detectors
) shows that coins were used extensively, especially in the eastern half of England, both within and outside towns; they also circulated widely, and are frequently found far from their mint of origin. Substantial numbers of English coins have been found elsewhere in Europe, especially in Italy and Scandinavia, while English designs were influential on the emergent coinages of Ireland
, Denmark
, Sweden
, Norway
and Bohemia
.
were still part of a vibrant and quite efficient economic and monetary system that stretched over the whole Roman world. Precious metal coins of gold
and silver
were used for the payment of taxes, then reminted for payment to the military and civil service. Bronze
coinage was issued on a more occasional basis and was primarily produced to serve the needs of commerce in the provinces. Minting – and control over precious metals in general – across the western empire was under the control of the comes sacrarum largitionum
, with a number of major mints
situated at Trier
, Arles
, Milan
, Ravenna
and Rome
. London
had operated as a mint in the first half of the 4th century, and again for a brief period under Magnus Maximus
, but by 400 inflows of coinage to Britain came from the continent.
Finds of coins are very numerous from throughout the 4th century and even from the first years of the fifth. However, in the early 5th century the situation took a dramatic turn for the worse. The supply of bronze coinage all but ceased after around 402, and both gold and silver also petered out by c. 410, coinciding with the departure of the British garrison with Constantine III
in 409. Hoard
s of coins and bullion – especially silver – from this period are very numerous in Britain, presumably due to disturbances of invasion, civil war and economic uncertainty. Some of these hoards could be very substantial indeed: the Hoxne
hoard from Norfolk
discovered in 1992 contained over 15,000 coins along with silver plate and jewellery.
The cessation in supply of freshly struck coins didn’t necessarily cause an immediate halt in the use of coinage. Numismatists
and archaeologists
have long been struck by the phenomenon of clipped siliquae
from the early 5th century, though precise dates and explanations for it remain elusive. Clipping may have carried on into the middle of the 5th century, or been restricted to the 410s and 20s, and was perhaps carried out as a means of taxation by a government deprived of new supplies of coinage. According to this model, siliquae of a specified weight would have been brought in, clipped, and finally reissued by unit rather than weight.
The later 5th and 6th centuries are very murky in almost every way, and coinage is no exception. The once vigorous late Roman monetary system lay in tatters, with almost no new minting and very little importation of new coins. Nevertheless, it is becoming apparent that coinage never faded away completely, and that re-use of the existing supply of coinage continued throughout the period, buoyed along by occasional incomers. Some archaeological excavations of Romano-British
settlements that persisted into this period have produced older coins that remained in circulation, as at Wroxeter
. Gold and bronze coins in particular are often found on early Anglo-Saxon
settlement sites and in graves, in many cases pierced or mounted for use as Jewellery
. Indeed, there is no telling exactly when any late Roman coin was lost, and in some cases they may have been in use well into the post-Roman period. As for new imports, the number known for this period has increased considerably in recent years thanks to the spread of metal-detecting
. Hoards from this period are rare, but two have been found in recent years at Oxborough
(2001) and Patching
(1997), both dating to the later 5th century and the latter including no fewer than fifty gold and silver coins dating from the period up to c. 470. A scattering of single-finds from the same period shows that the flow of coinage into fifth- and 6th-century Britain never dried up totally, and it appears that there was also some use of Byzantine coinage
in the 6th century: gold and especially bronze coins have been found in substantial numbers, even in the western part of Britain, which is normally less well represented in coin finds. This to some extent parallels the pattern of finds of North African pottery
from the same period, which is found extensively in western Britain on 6th-century sites. Unfortunately, the widespread use of Byzantine bronzes from this period as souvenirs from the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean means many finds of them must be treated with extreme care. The importation of current continental issues – mainly in gold – continued over the 6th century, with considerable numbers of Merovingian tremisses
circulating in southern and eastern England even by the end of the 6th century. It was on the basis of these coins that the first native English production of coins took place in the early 7th century.
pieces, modelled on contemporary Merovingian Frankish
coinage, and consisting largely of tremisses: one third of a gold solidus
, originally weighing 4.5g, but in the Anglo-Saxon context apparently based on a revised standard of 3.9g implemented in Gaul
from around the 580s. Frankish coins played an increasingly important role as currency in England as the 6th century went on, and the earliest Anglo-Saxon gold tremisses (sometimes referred to by numismatists
as thrymsas) were struck to circulate alongside these Frankish issues: all of the forty gold tremisses found in the burial at ‘mound one’ at Sutton Hoo (deposited c. 630), for instance, were Frankish. The earliest coins struck in England can be roughly dated to around the year 600: they include one gold tremissis struck by a moneyer named Eusebius working at Canterbury
(Dorovernia), and the Liudhard medalet
, a gold medallion (though in fabric very like a coin) found in Canterbury and bearing the name of a bishop Liudhard
, almost certainly the same bishop of that name whom Bede
’s Historia ecclesiastica
described as coming to England with Bertha, the Frankish bride of Æthelberht I of Kent.
The only substantial hoard
of English coins from this period was found at Crondall
, and included 69 English tremisses as well as a number of Frankish tremisses, probably deposited around 630. These and other finds reveal a range of types that rarely name a mint or issuing authority, though one scarce type bears the name of London, and others are struck in the name of King Eadbald of Kent
(616–40). In terms of design they are based on Roman and Merovingian prototypes.
Widespread use of metal detector
s in the last thirty years has substantially increased the number of coins known from this and indeed all periods. For all that the coins are still relatively rare and minting was primarily confined to the south-east, some were probably struck in Northumbria
, presumably at York, and both English and Frankish gold coins circulated widely. The arrangements behind minting are also quite obscure, and it cannot automatically be assumed that they were produced as a ‘royal’ coinage: bishops, abbots, lay magnates and perhaps individual moneyers may have provided the driving force behind minting.
Though the early Anglo-Saxon law-codes
must be used with caution for this period, they describe a wide range of compensatory payments in scillingas and scættas from c. 600 onwards. These terms reflect translations of continental legal usage, and may well describe measures of value and/or weight rather than coins as such, yet nonetheless it is probable that the gold tremisses produced in 7th-century England were referred to as scillingas.
in Merovingian Frankia. However, within a few years of c. 675 very large silver coinages were being struck in southeastern England as well. A few issues, such as those inscribed with the runic name Pada and the Latin Vanimundus, exist in both debased gold and silver, presumably spanning the changeover. The new silver coins are similar to the later tremisses in terms of size and weight: small (typically 10-12mm in diameter), thick and usually weighing 1–1.3g. Because of the references in the law-codes mentioned above, these new silver pieces have been known to numismatists as sceattas
since the 17th century. Contemporary terminology is uncertain, though it is likely that these coins were known as peningas (pennies), just like their later broader equivalents. Silver pennies of roughly this weight (1–1.6g) were to remain the sole unit of English currency until the 13th century, with the exception of rare silver halfpennies
and even rarer gold coins
.
The first (‘primary’) sceattas of series A, B and C were largely confined to Kent
and the Thames Estuary
, though the emergence of the ‘secondary’ sceattas (probably c. 710) introduced a breathtaking array of new designs and saw minting expand to many new areas: by the middle of the ‘secondary’ phase coins were being struck in Kent, the Thames Estuary, East Anglia
, eastern Mercia
, Northumbria
and Wessex
. Unfortunately, because very few coins bear any form of legend and there was extensive imitation and copying, it is extremely difficult to assign dates and minting-places to many of the types and series identified by modern scholars. These are arranged into lettered series according to the scheme of Stuart Rigold, devised in the 1960s and 70s, and sometimes by the numbers applied to types in the British Museum
catalogues of the 1880s and expanded thereafter to around 150 different varieties. The current chronology, basically laid down by Mark Blackburn in the mid-1980s, rests on the large Cimiez
hoard from southern Gaul, which contained sceattas of several secondary types alongside local issues of named rulers that allowed the hoard to be dated c. 715/20.
There remains much uncertainty about the organisation behind the sceattas and exactly what authorities lay behind minting. Some issues are so large that only major rulers could have been behind them, whilst others are so small that they could well have been the work of an individual moneyer working independently. Others display prominent and sophisticated religious motifs, suggesting that they may have been produced by monasteries or bishops. An exception to the general obscurity of the sceattas comes in Northumbria, where from a very early date the king and (arch)bishop of York
played a strong role in coinage production: King Aldfrith
was the first English king named on silver coinage anywhere, and his successors retained a relatively tight hold on coinage after production resumed under Eadberht
.
The early 8th century saw coinage production and circulation on a very impressive scale; greater indeed than at any other point after the 4th and before the 13th century. Some 2,500 finds of sceattas are recorded from England, particularly the east and the south, allowing study on the finer details of circulation and use. Sceattas were also produced and used in the Netherlands
and probably Jutland
. Minting places in the Low Countries such as Dorestad
and Domburg
supplied a significant proportion of the currency circulating in England at any one time, and were among the most important commercial centres in Europe. Sceattas provide invaluable evidence for the vigour with which trade across the North Sea
was conducted in the early 8th century.
(751–68) took the initiative and reformed the Frankish coinage, introducing a new, thinner, broader format (at least 15mm in diameter) struck in much finer silver. Importantly, these new coins all bore the king’s name and (usually) the name of the issuing mint
. English rulers followed suit around the same time, and the earliest signs of reform outside Northumbria (where a substantial and relatively high quality silver coinage remained in production, albeit sporadically, over the 8th century) came in East Anglia, where the obscure ruler Beonna reformed the local coinage sometime after he came to the throne in 749. His coins bear the royal name and that of the moneyer, and in fabric are midway between the sceattas and the new Frankish pennies. Initially struck in fine silver, Beonna’s coinage later declined in standard, though one of his moneyers survived to strike some of the earliest coins known for Offa of Mercia
.
It was Offa who introduced the broad penny to southumbrian England on a substantial scale, and made the employment of king’s and moneyer’s names standard at least three mints: Canterbury
, London
and somewhere in East Anglia
. His earliest coins bear an abbreviated version of the royal title influenced by that on the coinage of Pippin III, and on the reverse the moneyer’s name. Early in the course of his coinage (probably in the 760s or 770s) there were also smaller issues at Canterbury in the names of two local Kentish kings, Heaberht
(of whom only one coin survives) and Ecgberht II
. Production of broad silver pennies also persisted in East Anglia, commencing in Offa's name but later interrupted by a small coinage struck in the name of King Æthelberht II of East Anglia, who was executed by Offa in 794: only three specimens of his coinage survive today, probably produced in the 780s or 90s.
Offa’s coinage represents one of the high-points of Anglo-Saxon art
, and indeed they were probably the most artistically accomplished coins produced anywhere in Europe at that time: they stand in sharp contrast with the aniconic coins of contemporary Frankia. Portraits were introduced at an early stage, and were executed in a number of different styles betraying a range of artistic influences drawing on contemporary and Roman sources. Reverse designs included intricate crosses of various types, but the range of Offa's die-cutters encompassed other reverse designs including intertwining serpents, eels and the wolf and twins
. Uniquely in Anglo-Saxon England, coins were also struck at Canterbury in the name of the queen, Cynethryth
, from dies produced by the same talented individual responsible for the best of Offa’s portrait dies. This practice could have been inspired by encounters with Roman coins in the names of empresses. It is also possible, though less likely, that the appearance of Irene
on Byzantine coinage
led Offa’s queen to place her image on coins as well. Certainly Cynethryth emerges from surviving evidence as a formidable individual, who regularly witnessed contemporary charters immediately after her husband, was responsible for the running of his household and survived him to become a powerful abbess.
As with the sceattas considerable problems surround knowledge of exactly how the new coinage was organised and implemented. It is possible that the pennies of Offa’s reign still reflect the vestiges of the organisation behind the complex sceattas, with the diverse designs often varying from moneyer to moneyer. Other authorities exerted minting rights in his reign that may have been held for some time: the Bishop of London
(Eadberht
) is named on some coins, the only pennies struck in the name of an Anglo-Saxon bishop outside York and Canterbury; and in Canterbury the archbishops Iænberht
(765–92) and Æthelheard
(793–805) struck both independently and with Offa. Similarly, dating the reforms that brought this new penny coinage into being is contentious. It appears likely that production started at roughly the same time at London, Canterbury and East Anglia, perhaps c. 765–70, and the bulk of the coinage – including the portrait coinage – was probably produced in the 770s and 80s. Later in Offa’s reign there was a second reform in which the weight was raised, the size of the flan increased and a common non-portrait design introduced at all three mints. This ‘heavy coinage’ can be closely dated, for no examples of it are known in the name of Archbishop Iænberht, whilst there are no ‘light’ (i.e., pre-reform) pennies of Archbishop Æthelheard, indicating that the reform took place in 792 or 3.
The coins of Offa provide valuable evidence for a new dimension of royal authority and action with regard to the coinage, and have received much attention from historians because of their impressive imagery and range of royal titulature: Offa is variously entitled REX, REX M(erciorum), REX MERCIORU(m) and probably REX A(nglorum).
and Eadwald
– took power and issued coins in their own names, following the design of Offa’ heavy coinage. After a small issue at London based on this same type, the new Mercian ruler Coenwulf
instituted a reform of the coinage leading to the new tribrach type. This non-portrait type used an obverse design modelled on the earlier coinage of Cynethryth, and despite its use of the central M (for Merciorum) was adopted by Eadbearht, Eadwald and even by Beorhtric of Wessex
, who struck a very rare coinage around this time.
By 798 Coenwulf had regained Kent and East Anglia also came back under his power by the 9th century. He appointed a sub-ruler for Kent – his brother Cuthred
– in whose name coins were struck at Canterbury. Cuthred and his brother may have minted simultaneously in the cross-and-wedges portrait type current from around 805, but it is equally possible that they had sole control of the mint one after the other.
Around the same time, the archiepiscopal coinage at Canterbury also changed: the new archbishop, Wulfred
, was very eager to assert his ecclesiastical rights, even at the expense of the king, and instituted an archiepiscopal portrait coinage bearing no reference at all to Coenwulf. This attractive series was modelled on the silver denarii produced by Pope Hadrian I
(772–95).
Coenwulf continued a portrait coinage for the rest of his reign at Canterbury, London, East Anglia and, from c. 810, at a new mint located at Rochester in Kent. Canterbury came to dominate silver coin production, and whilst East Anglia and Rochester remained relatively stable, pennies from London become very rare: despite the recent discovery of a gold coin of Coenwulf with the legend DE VICO LVNDONIAE it is clear that the mint of London was in decline by around 800.
In the years between Coenwulf's death in 821 and Egbert of Wessex's
conquest of Kent and the south-east in 825, the mint at Canterbury weathered a turbulent period that is better reflected in the coins than any written source. Coenwulf’s brother and successor Ceolwulf I
held Kent, but coins in his name from Canterbury are very rare and struck by only a few of the full complement of moneyers. Nonetheless, his short reign provides evidence of quite strong interest in the coinage, and several types common to a number of mints were introduced: a feature not seen in the latter part of his predecessor's reign. The largest of these new types even encompassed the normally distinct East Anglian mint. Rochester became far more productive under Ceolwulf, perhaps to compensate for lower royal production at Canterbury. It looks like the greater part of Canterbury’s coinage from the years c. 822-4 consists of ‘anonymous’ pennies bearing a royal- or archiepiscopal-style portrait surrounded by the moneyer’s name and the mint name (Dorobernia civitas) on the reverse. No reference is made to any king or archbishop. This fascinating coinage seems to reflect a time when the moneyers were uncertain of whose authority to recognise, probably around Ceolwulf’s deposition in 823 by Beornwulf
. No Kentish coins are known in his name, but there are many in the name of one Baldred
, who was probably another Mercian sub-ruler of Kent, though this is difficult to tell for certain from the very scanty written records of this period. However, it is known that when Egbert of Wessex and his son Æthelwulf invaded Kent in 825 they put Baldred to flight and imposed their own rule.
Egbert’s campaign of conquest took him far beyond Kent and even through Mercia to the borders of Northumbria in 829-30. Unusually, this dramatic military success was reflected in an issue of coinage from London, with Egbert named REX M(erciorum). This is one of very few cases in Anglo-Saxon England where it looks like coinage was being used in a propagandistic way: design and production was not as closely tied to politics and current events as in the classical or modern period.
After these conquests Egbert retreated and consolidated his position in the south-east, leaving Mercia to Wiglaf
, who struck very a very rare coinage at London, now the only mint available to the kings of Mercia. Egbert's coinage from Kent at first continued the pattern of Baldred’s, but was reformed c. 828 to introduce a new reverse monogram type, retaining a portrait of the king on the obverse. Archiepiscopal minting was interrupted immediately after the West Saxon takeover, but resumed shortly before Wulfred’s death using the same monogram reverse as the royal coinage in conjunction with an archiepiscopal name and bust on the obverse; a type that continued under Wulfred’s successor Ceolnoth
, who came to power in 833.
The 9th century saw the spread of minting beyond the south-east, which had dominated production outside Northumbria since the end of the sceattas. The West Saxon mint initiated by Beorhtric continued to operate at a relatively low level under Egbert but remained very sporadic in operation between his death and Alfred
’s reign later in the 9th century. In East Anglia, coinage gradually became more substantial under the last Mercian rulers and, from c. 825, under a series of independent rulers: Æthelstan, Æthelweard
and (St) Edmund
. These kings mainly issued non-portrait pennies bearing a large central A, and other designs which were often particular to individual moneyers, though produced by a common die-cutter. When first adopted under Coenwulf, this central A probably represented part of an Alpha-Omega pair, but in East Anglia more likely signified Angli or (rex) Anglorum.
Under Æthelwulf, minting remained buoyant at Canterbury and Rochester and continued in the name of Archbishop Ceolnoth
throughout the period. A succession of four phases can be distinguished at these two mints. At Canterbury the first was a non-portrait coinage bearing the legend REX SAXONIORVM, inspired by Egbert’s West Saxon coinage; and a new portrait coinage bearing a wide range of reverse designs came second. At Rochester, the first type comprised a portrait element with diverse reverse designs struck by the royal moneyers, and also a probably episcopal element which does not name a moneyer or carry a portrait, but does bear the unusually long royal title REX OCCIDENTALIVM SAXONVM. In the second phase the episcopal coinage ceases and a non-portrait type was adopted by the royal moneyers. The last two phases of Æthelwulf’s coinage were common to both Rochester and Canterbury, with dies for both mints in the final phase coming from a common source at Canterbury. The third type of Æthelwulf’s reign was a non-portrait coinage with the ambiguous mint legend DORIBI (which could refer to either Canterbury, Dorobernia; or Rochester, Dorobrebia) and a monogram for CANT(ia). Æthelwulf’s last coinage was a new portrait type of very different style. This inscribed cross type may have only come into production after several years without coinage at Canterbury: just two moneyers from there and from Rochester survived from earlier types, possibly because of the Viking raid on Kent recorded in 851. This new coinage survived into the reign of Æthelwulf’s son Æthelberht (no genuine coins are known of Æthelbald, who ruled 858–60) under whom it became very substantial: about forty moneyers are known to have produced it. Another new portrait type, the short-lived floreate cross type, also appeared at the end of his reign but survives in very small numbers today. Since the inscribed cross type is known largely thanks to a large hoard discovered at Dorking
in the early 19th century and is found only rarely otherwise, it may be that the floreate cross coinage too was once much more substantial than its modern survival rate appears to indicate. The inscribed cross coinage is notable for the onset of major debasement, the centralisation of die-cutting for Canterbury and Rochester, and for a massive increase in the number of moneyers, so that almost 50 are known from the time of Æthelberht. These changes probably reflect the onset of a new and more intense royal management of the coinage, which was to be expanded under Æthelberht's successors.
In the reign of Berhtwulf of Mercia
(c. 840–52) minting at London, Mercia’s only remaining mint, began again in earnest, around the time of Æthelwulf’s second phase of coinage in the mid 840s. A mixture of portrait and non-portrait types was struck. Because of the long abeyance of the London mint, considerable support came from West Saxon Rochester in the form of dies and even moneyers, and it is possible that some coins in Berhtwulf’s name were actually produced in Rochester. It was once thought that this monetary co-operation was reflected in a unique penny bearing the name of Æthelwulf on one face and that of Berhtwulf on the other. However, this coin more likely represents an unofficial production without any particular political significance.
The recovery of Mercian minting was made most manifest by the adoption in Wessex of the ‘lunettes’ type first struck at London by Berhtwulf’s successor Burgred
. This coinage survives in very large numbers thanks to a great increase in minting, especially in the latter part of Burgred's reign: about twenty moneyers are known for Alfred
and 35–40 for Burgred. This period is particularly well known thanks to the discovery of a large number of hoards, presumably associated with Viking
raids. This coinage is very difficult to organise or categorise in any meaningful way. However, the lunettes type had become very debased by the early 870s when production was probably at its highest, and another reform was initiated in the mid 870s by Alfred (‘the Great’) of Wessex. This introduced the heavier, finer cross-and-lozenge type after a number of very rare and interesting experimental issues were struck in the years around the reform. At London, which lay within the Mercian kingdom, Alfred was initially recognised as king of Mercia as well as Wessex after the deposition of Burgred in 873/4, and was even called REX ANG(lorum) on one of two known examples of the two emperors portrait penny type. The other specimen of this fascinating type is in the name of Ceolwulf II
, the new Mercian king installed by the Vikings. Ceolwulf also struck pennies of the cross and type, and the earliest known round English halfpenny
belongs to this phase of coinage.
Further reforms were initiated by Alfred later in his reign. Around 880, London
struck an innovative series of portrait pennies bearing Alfred’s portrait and, on the reverse, a Monogram
of Lundonia. Later one moneyer, Tilewine, placed his name on the reverse as well, but this coinage was for the most part struck without moneyers' names. The main type struck in the latter part of Alfred’s reign, however, was the non-portrait two line type. Again, a few different and perhaps experimental types have survived in small numbers. These include a portrait coin – probably from around the same time as the London monogram pennies – with the mint-name ÆT GLEAPA (‘from Gloucester
’), which had become an important centre of ‘English’ Mercia under Alfred’s ealdorman Æthelred; a small number of ‘four-line’ non-portrait pennies with reverse mint names assigning their production to Winchester and Exeter; another non-portrait series probably struck at Oxford (OHSNAFORDA); and large silver ‘offering pieces’ inscribed ELIMOSINA (‘alms’).
Northumbria’s numismatic history was quite distinct from that of the south. Coinage never petered out as completely as it did below the Humber, and until close to the end of its history Northumbrian coinage remained closely linked to the king and archbishop. However, debasement became a serious issue around the end of the 8th century, when numismatists begin to apply the term stycas to Northumbrian coinage (based on a 10th-century gloss
in the Lindisfarne Gospels
; contemporary terminology is unknown). Both the political and the numismatic chronology of this period is very confused, with many accounts and suggestions competing with one another. By the middle of the 9th century Northumbrian coinage contained almost no silver and was being produced on a massive scale: many tens of thousands of coins are known today, and several very large hoards have been found, such as one from the churchyard in Hexham which contained some 8000 stycas. After a final phase of considerable disorganisation, the stycas were phased out by the Scandinavian rulers who took over Northumbria in 867, and replaced with a new penny coinage on the model of coinage in the Carolingian empire and southumbrian England. Two exceptional coins illustrate that Northumbrian coinage in the 9th century may not have been entirely composed of stycas: a gold Mancus
survives in the name of Archbishop Wigmund
, modelled on contemporary gold solidi of Louis the Pious
; and a silver penny found in the Cornish Trewhiddle
hoard of c. 868 in the name of EANRED REX, with an anomalous reverse legend apparently reading ĐES MONETA (‘his coin’(?)) followed by an Omega. The latter coin has still not been conclusively fitted into context: its style suggests production around 850, but Eanred of Northumbria
probably died in 840. It may therefore be either a posthumous commemorative issue of some sort, or a survivor of a very rare Southumbrian coinage in the name of an otherwise forgotten ruler.
settlers in England found themselves in a more sophisticated coin-using economy than they were accustomed to at home; consequently it is unsurprising that the first coins that can be associated with the Vikings in England are imitations of Alfred’s coinage, particularly the ‘London monogram’ and ‘two-line’ types. These are very numerous today, and for a long time caused great difficulty for numismatists working on Alfred’s coinage, who could not always tell them from the genuine issues. However, before the end of the 9th century new silver coinages had begun in East Anglia and at York. In East Anglia, a coinage was struck in imitation of Alfred’s in the name of Guthrum (with his baptismal name Æthelstan), followed by a very large coinage naming the martyred Saint Edmund
on the obverse, which was struck by at least sixty moneyers (the bulk of them bearing names indicating continental origins). This coinage persisted until the conquest of East Anglia by Edward the Elder
in 917/18. In Northumbria, the highly debased styca coinage came to an end and was replaced with a fine silver coinage, which is very well known thanks to the huge (c. 8,000 coin) Cuerdale
hoard deposited in the first decade of the 10th century.
Sometimes this coinage named local Viking rulers (the identification of whom with figures from written sources is often impossible or contentious) but, at the start of the 10th century, the name of the mint and that of Saint Peter
replaced references to king and moneyer. From the 910s the York coinage resumed naming the ruler and also began to display a range of interesting devices connected to the Scandinavian presence in York: swords, hammers, banners and a bird variously interpreted as a raven or dove. The York pennies of Anlaf/Olaf Guthfrithson
(939–41) present the first known use of Old Norse in the Latin alphabet anywhere in the legend ANLAF CVNVNGIR (‘King Anlaf’).
Although Northumbria and East Anglia were the main bastions of Viking coinage, at various times there was also production in the East Midlands, for instance of coins naming Saint Martin
at Lincoln
.
in some ways continued the types and organisation current under his father Alfred in Wessex and English Mercia, but with the expansion of West Saxon control into the Midlands and East Anglia
the currency system became more complex as new regions were incorporated into Edward’s kingdom. For the most part the coinage was non-portrait and simple in design, though some mints in English Mercia
struck an interesting series of pictorial reverse types. Since mint names are again very rare, attributions must largely be made by working backwards from Æthelstan
’s reign when mint names were often found on coins of the circumscription cross and bust crowned types. These coinages, struck at about thirty named mints after the conquest of the kingdom of York
in 927, reflect a renewed effort on the king’s part to have a single, centrally controlled coinage spanning the kingdom: types were standardised, the royal title was expanded from the usual REX to REX SAXONUM or even REX TO(tius) BRIT(anniae), as one finds in contemporary charters. It was also under Æthelstan that coinage was first mentioned in any detail in legal documentation: a law-code issued by him at Grateley
(probably around 926-30 though incorporating numismatic data from somewhat earlier) details the acceptance of a single currency and penalties for forgery, and goes on to list a series of minting places and the number of moneyers permitted to each.
Towards the end of Æthelstan’s reign and in the time of his successors Edmund
, Eadred, Eadwig and the first part of Edgar
’s reign, the coinage was of a regionalised character, with up to seven regions of monetary circulation. The structure of this system is clearest for northern England thanks to the discovery of more numerous hoards in that part of the country. Coins normally stayed within their area of production, and different types were current in each region. However, these regions were not static, and many of the 'regional' types were, to the untrained eye, comparatively similar. The predominant type bore the king's name in circumscription on the obverse (normally around a small cross), and the moneyer's name in two lines with various ornaments on the reverse. At various times a circumscription reverse was also used, which gave scope for a longer legend; or a portrait obverse. For reasons unknown, East Anglia in particular favoured royal portraits between the 930s and 970s, though it was also used sporadically elsewhere. Mints are not normally named, but it is usually possible to attribute coins to their region of origin. However, despite the regionalised types and circulation of coinage, pennies remained of relatively stable size, weight and fineness, and most importantly were always struck in the name of the West Saxon king. Even when the kingdom was divided between Eadwig and Edgar in 957, coinage seems to have remained the preserve of Eadwig, the senior partner in rule, even in the mint towns ruled by Edgar.
The last phase of this regionalised coinage, struck in the first decade of Edgar’s sole reign, produced a number of unusual features. Mint names became more common, and there were a number of appropriations from earlier English coinage, such as a resurrection of Alfred’s London monogram on halfpennies and Æthelstan’s royal title REX TO(tius) BRIT(anniae). This revival of interest in the coinage foreshadowed an even greater reform at the end of Edgar’s reign.
reformed the coinage is not certain: that it was towards the end of his reign is clear from the coins, and the only help provided by written sources is a reference in Roger of Wendover
’s 13th-century chronicle, which implies the reform may have taken place in or after 973. Its impact, however, cannot be underestimated, and it formed the basis of the English coinage until the reign of Henry II
. Old coins disappeared from circulation and a single standardised type was introduced at around forty mints across the country, bearing the royal portrait and title on the obverse and the names of moneyer and mint around a small central cross on the reverse. Initially, too, all new dies were distributed from a single die-cutting centre located at Winchester
. Such centralisation was unusual, and occurred in only a few of the other types that came after: more commonly, the same type was used throughout the country but die production devolved to a number of regional die-cutting centres which distributed dies to nearby, smaller mints. Even within the nine-month reign of Harold II
in 1066 coins were struck with a new design in his name at forty-eight mints. Around seventy places in England (and in Wales under the Normans
) were active as mints during this period, ranging hugely in size and productivity: the largest was London
, though York
and Lincoln remained important throughout the period, and other major mints included Winchester
, Norwich
and Stamford
. At the other end of the scale are places that were never important mints in the Anglo-Saxon period and are little more than villages, hillforts and market towns today, including Melton Mowbray
, Milborne Port
, Castle Gotha, Cadbury Castle
and Dunwich
. Mints of this kind were often only active during short periods, such as a number of 'emergency' mints set up during the reign of Æthelred II because of Viking depredations.
The designs chosen for the coinage were relatively uniform, following the pattern of Edgar’s reformed pennies: the obverse carried some form of royal portrait as well as the royal name and title, whilst the reverse gave the name of the moneyer and the mint around some form of cross. Within this format, however, there was much variation. Portraits could face either way and reflect a wide range of influences. Under Æthelred II, for instance, one type was based upon early 4th-century Roman coins showing the emperor in military garb, with helmet and armour; another was based on civilian portraits of other 4th-century emperors without any form of headgear. Under Edward the Confessor
there was strong German influence in the portraits from the last fifteen years or so of his reign, perhaps as a result of Edward’s employment of German goldsmith
s named Theoderic and Otto. These show the king bearded, helmeted and crowned, and in some cases even facing straight forward or seated on a throne.
The existence of moneyer and mint names on each and every coin provide valuable evidence for the study of not only mint structure (in terms of how productive certain moneyers were, or how many shared dies) but also of contemporary naming patterns and – to some extent – the makeup of the population. Mints located in the old Danelaw, like York
and Lincoln
, contained a preponderance of moneyers with Scandinavian
names, whilst one sometimes comes across moneyers all over the country with continental names, or even more exotic names in Old Irish
.
This first type, usually known as the First small cross or Reform type, remained in currency for Edgar’s last years, the whole of Edward the Martyr
’s short reign and even into the first years of Æthelred II, who came to the throne in 978/9. At some point early in his reign, however, another of the features that was to characterise the late Anglo-Saxon currency system came into play: the first of many changes of type. More than fifty such changes occurred during the existence of the coinage as reformed by Edgar, which persisted until the 1150s. Within the reign of Æthelred, for instance, six such changes can be seen, manifested in the progression of the following types: First Small cross; First hand; Second hand; Crux; Long Cross; Helmet; Last Small cross. After the death of Cnut, under whom another three types (Quatrefoil, Helmet and Short cross) were struck, types become more numerous and changes presumably more frequent: fourteen types were struck in the years between 1035 and the Norman Conquest
of 1066, probably lasting only two or three years each. It is presumed that each change of type required coins of old money to be exchanged for new, with the king and the moneyer taking a cut either as a portion of the value of the new coins or from the minting process. The weight of the coinage varied considerably, even within types, suggesting that there may have been some profit taken in minting by extracting silver from the coinage, though within the kingdom of England it would have been possible to enforce that all coins be accepted at face value regardless of weight. Hoard evidence, at least from before the 1030s, suggests that reminting of the whole coinage was stipulated at each change of type, for a number of hoards survive consisting of only one type. Alongside these, however, are ‘savings’ hoards, which contain a mixture of two or more types; and a mixture of types becomes much more common in hoards from after the 1030s. One possible explanation for this change in the pattern of production and hoarding is that it came to be the rule, after the 1030s, that only payments to the crown had to be in the current type, whereas other types of English coinage were viable for other purposes.
Remarkably little written evidence survives to help numismatists and historians understand how the coinage and its system of changes of type actually functioned. Domesday Book
does record that moneyers at certain mints had to go to London
to purchase new dies for twenty shillings quando moneta vertebatur (‘when the coinage was changed’), and that certain towns paid annual sums to the king for the privilege of running a mint. At several towns bishops and abbots had rights to the profits of one or more moneyers (which normally went to the king), but these are no longer reflected by any changes in the design of the coins.
Numismatists have sometimes tried to discern a very rigid system of organisation in the late Anglo-Saxon coinage: one, Michael Dolley, believed that until the death of Cnut in 1035, each type lasted six years, with a few exceptions – such as the Last Small Cross type at the end of Æthelred’s reign – lasting longer under very unusual conditions. Some features seem to support this belief, at least for the earlier period. Certain changes of type apparently coincided with datable historic events: no coins of the Helmet type survive from the mint of Wilton
, for instance, whereas no coins of the preceding Long Cross type are known from nearby Salisbury
, but moneyers with the same names as those from Wilton started to operate there in the Helmet type. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
records that in 1003 Wilton was sacked by Vikings and the inhabitants retreated to Salisbury, and it is likely that the change of type coincided with this event. However, there are a number of difficulties with reconstructing such a fixed framework. Not all types are as well represented in the surviving material, and it is clear that this is not always simply a result of a few large hoards distorting our view. There are a number of very small and rare types which were certainly never meant to become fully fledged issues, though some bear a clear relationship to them. Examples from the reign of Æthelred II include the Benediction Hand type and the Intermediate Small Cross type, as well as the famous Agnus Dei type: a unique and fascinating issue on which the king’s portrait and the reverse cross are replaced with, respectively, the Lamb of God and the Holy Dove. The exact context for the production of this very rare coinage is unclear (eighteen specimens survive, as of November 2008): it was only struck at smaller mints, mostly in the midlands, either as an abortive main issue or as a special religious coinage for some specific purpose or occasion. Although the dating is unclear, it may be associated with the Eynsham
gathering and the Penitential Edict of 1009. But the difficulties with the sexennial theory are not restricted to smaller, rarer types. The Second Hand type of Æthelred, for example, was not much different in appearance from its predecessor, raising the question of how easily people would have told it and the old coinage apart. More importantly, only minuscule numbers of the type survive from more northerly mints such as Lincoln
and York
which, in the rest of the period, were some of the most productive in the kingdom. It is possible that the Second Hand type represents a continuation of the First Hand type, which may have run on rather longer than six years as part of a mechanism that did envisage changes of type, but not necessarily on a strict sexennial basis.
The late Anglo-Saxon coinage is best understood for the period c. 990–c. 1030 thanks to the discovery of many tens of thousands of coins in hoards from Scandinavia
. Connections between England and Scandinavia were very close at this time, with raiders, traders, mercenaries and, ultimately, kings regularly crossing the North Sea
. English coins in Scandinavian hoards probably include at least some profit from raiding and the tributary payments referred to as Danegeld
. Payments to Danish troops employed by the English kings continued until 1051, when Edward the Confessor
dismissed the last of them. English coin finds in Scandinavia become even fewer after this time. However, since large numbers of roughly contemporary Arabic
and, later, German coins have also been found in Scandinavia, it is probable that the bulk of the English imports came via trade rather than military action.
Anglo-Saxons
Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...
of the 7th century: to the small, thick silver coins known to contemporaries as pæningas or denarii
Denarius
In the Roman currency system, the denarius was a small silver coin first minted in 211 BC. It was the most common coin produced for circulation but was slowly debased until its replacement by the antoninianus...
, though now often referred to as sceattas
Sceat
Sceattas were small, thick silver coins minted in England, Frisia and Jutland during the Anglo-Saxon period.-History:Their name derives from an Old English word meaning 'wealth', which has been applied to these coins since the seventeenth century, based on interpretations of the law-code of King...
by numismatists. Broader, thinner pennies inscribed with the name of the king were introduced to southern England in the middle of the 8th century. Coins of this format remained the foundation of the English currency until the 14th century.
Overview
The history of Anglo-SaxonAnglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxon may refer to:* Anglo-Saxons, a group that invaded Britain** Old English, their language** Anglo-Saxon England, their history, one of various ships* White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, an ethnicity* Anglo-Saxon economy, modern macroeconomic term...
coinage spans more than five centuries, from the end of Roman rule in Britain in the 5th century, down to the death of Harold Godwinson
Harold Godwinson
Harold Godwinson was the last Anglo-Saxon King of England.It could be argued that Edgar the Atheling, who was proclaimed as king by the witan but never crowned, was really the last Anglo-Saxon king...
at the Battle of Hastings
Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings occurred on 14 October 1066 during the Norman conquest of England, between the Norman-French army of Duke William II of Normandy and the English army under King Harold II...
on 14 October 1066. It can be divided into four basic phases:
- c. 450–c. 550: a very low level of coin-use in BritainGreat BritainGreat Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
, characterised by re-use of Roman coinage, though often in a non-monetary context. A small number of coins continued to be brought in from GaulGaulGaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...
and elsewhere on the Continent. - c. 550–c. 680: the ‘gold’ phase of currency, which began with an increase in the rate of importation of continental gold, principally in the form of tremissesTremissisTremissis was a currency of the Late Ancient Rome, equal to one-third of a solidus. Tremissis coins continued to be minted by descendants of the Roman Empire, such as Anglo-Saxon Britain or the Eastern Roman Empire.-External links:*...
. From around 620 English gold coins of similar format were produced, often known to numismatists as thrymsas. By the middle of the 7th century the quantity of gold in these coins was falling quickly, such that by the 670s they were more or less completely silver. - c. 680–c. 750 (867 in Northumbria): the age of the sceatSceatSceattas were small, thick silver coins minted in England, Frisia and Jutland during the Anglo-Saxon period.-History:Their name derives from an Old English word meaning 'wealth', which has been applied to these coins since the seventeenth century, based on interpretations of the law-code of King...
tas – small, thick silver coins which evolved out of the latest, debased gold coins. These should more correctly be referred to as pennies or denarii as in weight and fineness they approximated the form the English penny was to retain for centuries, and contemporary references suggest this is how they were known. Most sceattas do not bear an inscription and are thus difficult to attribute. It should be noted that in NorthumbriaNorthumbriaNorthumbria was a medieval kingdom of the Angles, in what is now Northern England and South-East Scotland, becoming subsequently an earldom in a united Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. The name reflects the approximate southern limit to the kingdom's territory, the Humber Estuary.Northumbria was...
, coins of this format continued to be struck under closer royal control until the 860s, though by the early 9th century they contained only a negligible quantity of precious metal. - c. 750–14 October 1066: the silver coinage of sceattas petered out in southumbrian England in the middle of the 8th century, to be replaced by a broader, thinner model of silver coinage modelled on that of contemporary Carolingian coinage. These new coins carried legends naming the king, moneyer and (later) the mint of origin. With various modifications in weight (within the range 1.00g–1.70g) and fineness this format of coinage remained standard for the rest of the period, and indeed silver pennies of similar design remained the basis for the English currency until the 14th century. Pennies of this form were made by English kings from OffaOffa of MerciaOffa was the King of Mercia from 757 until his death in July 796. The son of Thingfrith and a descendant of Eowa, Offa came to the throne after a period of civil war following the assassination of Æthelbald after defeating the other claimant Beornred. In the early years of Offa's reign it is likely...
onwards, and also by vikingVikingThe term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century.These Norsemen used their famed longships to...
rulers from the later 9th century.
In the gold phase of the coinage, the currency consisted overwhelmingly of gold tremisses or thrymsas of c. 1.10–1.30g, though a few solidi
Solidus
Solidus may refer to:*Solidus , the "⁄" grammatical punctuation character, also used in mathematics*Slash a sign, "/" used as a punctuation mark and for various other purposes...
exist, modelled on Roman
Roman currency
The Roman currency during most of the Roman Republic and the western half of the Roman Empire consisted of coins including the aureus , the denarius , the sestertius , the dupondius , and the as...
coins. Thereafter the currency was more or less based on a single denomination: the silver penny. In the early 870s the first round halfpennies were produced under Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great was King of Wessex from 871 to 899.Alfred is noted for his defence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of southern England against the Vikings, becoming the only English monarch still to be accorded the epithet "the Great". Alfred was the first King of the West Saxons to style himself...
and Ceolwulf II of Mercia
Ceolwulf II of Mercia
Ceolwulf II was the last king of the Mercians. He succeeded Burgred of Mercia who was deposed in 874.-Dynastic background:...
; these were produced sporadically and in small quantity until Edgar’s reform of the 970s, after which it became common to cut whole pennies into halves and quarters, often at the time of production. The only known examples of larger silver denominations are two ‘offering pieces’ produced in the reign of Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great was King of Wessex from 871 to 899.Alfred is noted for his defence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of southern England against the Vikings, becoming the only English monarch still to be accorded the epithet "the Great". Alfred was the first King of the West Saxons to style himself...
weighing the equivalent of six regular pennies, which were made as alms-pieces, probably to be sent abroad.
Although gold ceased to be the predominant form of currency in the 7th century, from the late 8th century onwards there was some use of fine gold coinage for special, high-value transactions. These gold pieces were often known as mancus
Mancus
Mancus was a term used in early medieval Europe to denote either a gold coin, a weight of gold of 4.25g , or a unit of account of thirty silver pence. This made it worth about a months wages for a skilled worker, such as a craftsman or a soldier...
es. The form of gold coinage varied in the 8th and 9th centuries, drawing inspiration from Roman, Byzantine, Arabic and Carolingian gold coinages, but by the 10th century gold coins were made simply by striking a gold piece with the same dies as were used for regular minting of silver. Only eight English gold coins with intelligible legends survive from between the 8th century and 1066; there are also some coins that may or may not be of English origin which bear no legend, and specimens of contemporary foreign gold found in England.
It is difficult to ascertain the nature and extent of coin-use in Anglo-Saxon England. Written references to minting and money are scarce, and it is likely that even a single silver penny had considerable buying power – perhaps something in the region of £10–£30 in modern currency. Their use may also have been concentrated in certain classes of society, and was probably most associated with particular transactions such as the payment of rents, tributes and legal fees. However, analysis of surviving single-finds (principally made since the 1970s by users of metal-detectors
Metal detector
A metal detector is a device which responds to metal that may not be readily apparent.The simplest form of a metal detector consists of an oscillator producing an alternating current that passes through a coil producing an alternating magnetic field...
) shows that coins were used extensively, especially in the eastern half of England, both within and outside towns; they also circulated widely, and are frequently found far from their mint of origin. Substantial numbers of English coins have been found elsewhere in Europe, especially in Italy and Scandinavia, while English designs were influential on the emergent coinages of Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
, Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
and Bohemia
Bohemia
Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...
.
After Rome: prelude to the Anglo-Saxon coinage
At the end of the 4th century, the Roman provinces of BritainRoman Britain
Roman Britain was the part of the island of Great Britain controlled by the Roman Empire from AD 43 until ca. AD 410.The Romans referred to the imperial province as Britannia, which eventually comprised all of the island of Great Britain south of the fluid frontier with Caledonia...
were still part of a vibrant and quite efficient economic and monetary system that stretched over the whole Roman world. Precious metal coins of gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
and silver
Silver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
were used for the payment of taxes, then reminted for payment to the military and civil service. Bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
coinage was issued on a more occasional basis and was primarily produced to serve the needs of commerce in the provinces. Minting – and control over precious metals in general – across the western empire was under the control of the comes sacrarum largitionum
Comes
Comes , plural comites , is the Latin word for companion, either individually or as a member of a collective known as comitatus, especially the suite of a magnate, in some cases large and/or formal enough to have a specific name, such as a cohors amicorum. The word comes derives from com- "with" +...
, with a number of major mints
Mint (coin)
A mint is an industrial facility which manufactures coins for currency.The history of mints correlates closely with the history of coins. One difference is that the history of the mint is usually closely tied to the political situation of an era...
situated at Trier
Trier
Trier, historically called in English Treves is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC....
, Arles
Arles
Arles is a city and commune in the south of France, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department, of which it is a subprefecture, in the former province of Provence....
, Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, Ravenna
Ravenna
Ravenna is the capital city of the Province of Ravenna in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy and the second largest comune in Italy by land area, although, at , it is little more than half the size of the largest comune, Rome...
and Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
. London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
had operated as a mint in the first half of the 4th century, and again for a brief period under Magnus Maximus
Magnus Maximus
Magnus Maximus , also known as Maximianus and Macsen Wledig in Welsh, was Western Roman Emperor from 383 to 388. As commander of Britain, he usurped the throne against Emperor Gratian in 383...
, but by 400 inflows of coinage to Britain came from the continent.
Finds of coins are very numerous from throughout the 4th century and even from the first years of the fifth. However, in the early 5th century the situation took a dramatic turn for the worse. The supply of bronze coinage all but ceased after around 402, and both gold and silver also petered out by c. 410, coinciding with the departure of the British garrison with Constantine III
Constantine III (usurper)
Flavius Claudius Constantinus, known in English as Constantine III was a Roman general who declared himself Western Roman Emperor in Britannia in 407 and established himself in Gaul. Recognised by the Emperor Honorius in 409, collapsing support and military setbacks saw him abdicate in 411...
in 409. Hoard
Hoard
In archaeology, a hoard is a collection of valuable objects or artifacts, sometimes purposely buried in the ground. This would usually be with the intention of later recovery by the hoarder; hoarders sometimes died before retrieving the hoard, and these surviving hoards may be uncovered by...
s of coins and bullion – especially silver – from this period are very numerous in Britain, presumably due to disturbances of invasion, civil war and economic uncertainty. Some of these hoards could be very substantial indeed: the Hoxne
Hoxne
Hoxne is an anciently established village in the Mid Suffolk district of Suffolk, England, about five miles east-southeast of Diss, Norfolk and one-half mile south of the River Waveney...
hoard from Norfolk
Norfolk
Norfolk is a low-lying county in the East of England. It has borders with Lincolnshire to the west, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea coast and to the north-west the county is bordered by The Wash. The county...
discovered in 1992 contained over 15,000 coins along with silver plate and jewellery.
The cessation in supply of freshly struck coins didn’t necessarily cause an immediate halt in the use of coinage. Numismatists
Numismatics
Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money, and related objects. While numismatists are often characterized as students or collectors of coins, the discipline also includes the broader study of money and other payment media used to resolve debts and the...
and archaeologists
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
have long been struck by the phenomenon of clipped siliquae
Siliqua
The siliqua is the modern name given to small, thin, Roman silver coins produced from 4th century and later. When the coins were in circulation, the Latin word siliqua was a unit of weight defined as one-twentyfourth of the weight of a Roman solidus .The term siliqua comes from the siliqua graeca,...
from the early 5th century, though precise dates and explanations for it remain elusive. Clipping may have carried on into the middle of the 5th century, or been restricted to the 410s and 20s, and was perhaps carried out as a means of taxation by a government deprived of new supplies of coinage. According to this model, siliquae of a specified weight would have been brought in, clipped, and finally reissued by unit rather than weight.
The later 5th and 6th centuries are very murky in almost every way, and coinage is no exception. The once vigorous late Roman monetary system lay in tatters, with almost no new minting and very little importation of new coins. Nevertheless, it is becoming apparent that coinage never faded away completely, and that re-use of the existing supply of coinage continued throughout the period, buoyed along by occasional incomers. Some archaeological excavations of Romano-British
Romano-British
Romano-British culture describes the culture that arose in Britain under the Roman Empire following the Roman conquest of AD 43 and the creation of the province of Britannia. It arose as a fusion of the imported Roman culture with that of the indigenous Britons, a people of Celtic language and...
settlements that persisted into this period have produced older coins that remained in circulation, as at Wroxeter
Wroxeter
Wroxeter is a village in Shropshire, England. It forms part of the civil parish of Wroxeter and Uppington and is located in the Severn Valley about south-east of Shrewsbury.-History:...
. Gold and bronze coins in particular are often found on early Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxons
Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...
settlement sites and in graves, in many cases pierced or mounted for use as Jewellery
Jewellery
Jewellery or jewelry is a form of personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.With some exceptions, such as medical alert bracelets or military dog tags, jewellery normally differs from other items of personal adornment in that it has no other purpose than to...
. Indeed, there is no telling exactly when any late Roman coin was lost, and in some cases they may have been in use well into the post-Roman period. As for new imports, the number known for this period has increased considerably in recent years thanks to the spread of metal-detecting
Metal detector
A metal detector is a device which responds to metal that may not be readily apparent.The simplest form of a metal detector consists of an oscillator producing an alternating current that passes through a coil producing an alternating magnetic field...
. Hoards from this period are rare, but two have been found in recent years at Oxborough
Oxborough
Oxborough is a village and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk.It covers an area of and had a population of 240 in 106 households as of the 2001 census. For the purposes of local government, it falls within the district of Breckland....
(2001) and Patching
Patching
Patching is a small village and civil parish that lies amidst the fields and woods of the southern slopes of the South Downs in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. It has a history going back to before the Domesday survey of 1087. It is located four miles to the east of Arundel, to the...
(1997), both dating to the later 5th century and the latter including no fewer than fifty gold and silver coins dating from the period up to c. 470. A scattering of single-finds from the same period shows that the flow of coinage into fifth- and 6th-century Britain never dried up totally, and it appears that there was also some use of Byzantine coinage
Byzantine coinage
Byzantine currency, money used in the Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of the West, consisted of mainly two types of coins: the gold solidus and a variety of clearly valued bronze coins...
in the 6th century: gold and especially bronze coins have been found in substantial numbers, even in the western part of Britain, which is normally less well represented in coin finds. This to some extent parallels the pattern of finds of North African pottery
Pottery
Pottery is the material from which the potteryware is made, of which major types include earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. The place where such wares are made is also called a pottery . Pottery also refers to the art or craft of the potter or the manufacture of pottery...
from the same period, which is found extensively in western Britain on 6th-century sites. Unfortunately, the widespread use of Byzantine bronzes from this period as souvenirs from the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean means many finds of them must be treated with extreme care. The importation of current continental issues – mainly in gold – continued over the 6th century, with considerable numbers of Merovingian tremisses
Tremissis
Tremissis was a currency of the Late Ancient Rome, equal to one-third of a solidus. Tremissis coins continued to be minted by descendants of the Roman Empire, such as Anglo-Saxon Britain or the Eastern Roman Empire.-External links:*...
circulating in southern and eastern England even by the end of the 6th century. It was on the basis of these coins that the first native English production of coins took place in the early 7th century.
The earliest gold coinage: thrymsas
The earliest known English coins are GoldGold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
pieces, modelled on contemporary Merovingian Frankish
Franks
The Franks were a confederation of Germanic tribes first attested in the third century AD as living north and east of the Lower Rhine River. From the third to fifth centuries some Franks raided Roman territory while other Franks joined the Roman troops in Gaul. Only the Salian Franks formed a...
coinage, and consisting largely of tremisses: one third of a gold solidus
Solidus (coin)
The solidus was originally a gold coin issued by the Romans, and a weight measure for gold more generally, corresponding to 4.5 grams.-Roman and Byzantine coinage:...
, originally weighing 4.5g, but in the Anglo-Saxon context apparently based on a revised standard of 3.9g implemented in Gaul
Gaul
Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...
from around the 580s. Frankish coins played an increasingly important role as currency in England as the 6th century went on, and the earliest Anglo-Saxon gold tremisses (sometimes referred to by numismatists
Numismatics
Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money, and related objects. While numismatists are often characterized as students or collectors of coins, the discipline also includes the broader study of money and other payment media used to resolve debts and the...
as thrymsas) were struck to circulate alongside these Frankish issues: all of the forty gold tremisses found in the burial at ‘mound one’ at Sutton Hoo (deposited c. 630), for instance, were Frankish. The earliest coins struck in England can be roughly dated to around the year 600: they include one gold tremissis struck by a moneyer named Eusebius working at Canterbury
Canterbury
Canterbury is a historic English cathedral city, which lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a district of Kent in South East England. It lies on the River Stour....
(Dorovernia), and the Liudhard medalet
Liudhard medalet
The Liudhard medalet is a gold Anglo-Saxon coin or small medal found some time before 1844 near St Martin's Church in Canterbury, England. It was part of the Canterbury-St Martin's hoard of six items. The coin, along with other items found with it, now resides in the World Museum Liverpool...
, a gold medallion (though in fabric very like a coin) found in Canterbury and bearing the name of a bishop Liudhard
Liudhard
Liudhard was a Frankish bishop – of where is unclear – and the chaplain of Queen Bertha of Kent, whom she brought with her from the continent upon her marriage to King Æthelberht of Kent...
, almost certainly the same bishop of that name whom Bede
Bede
Bede , also referred to as Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede , was a monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth, today part of Sunderland, England, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow , both in the Kingdom of Northumbria...
’s Historia ecclesiastica
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum
The Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum is a work in Latin by Bede on the history of the Christian Churches in England, and of England generally; its main focus is on the conflict between Roman and Celtic Christianity.It is considered to be one of the most important original references on...
described as coming to England with Bertha, the Frankish bride of Æthelberht I of Kent.
The only substantial hoard
Hoard
In archaeology, a hoard is a collection of valuable objects or artifacts, sometimes purposely buried in the ground. This would usually be with the intention of later recovery by the hoarder; hoarders sometimes died before retrieving the hoard, and these surviving hoards may be uncovered by...
of English coins from this period was found at Crondall
Crondall
Crondall is a village and large civil parish in the north east of Hampshire, England and is all that remains of the old Hundred of Crondall referred to in the Domesday Book of 1086. Various earlier spellings have in common the use of a "u" instead of the "o" and the village is still properly...
, and included 69 English tremisses as well as a number of Frankish tremisses, probably deposited around 630. These and other finds reveal a range of types that rarely name a mint or issuing authority, though one scarce type bears the name of London, and others are struck in the name of King Eadbald of Kent
Eadbald of Kent
Eadbald was King of Kent from 616 until his death in 640. He was the son of King Æthelberht and his wife Bertha, a daughter of the Merovingian king Charibert. Æthelberht made Kent the dominant force in England during his reign and became the first Anglo-Saxon king to convert to Christianity from...
(616–40). In terms of design they are based on Roman and Merovingian prototypes.
Widespread use of metal detector
Metal detector
A metal detector is a device which responds to metal that may not be readily apparent.The simplest form of a metal detector consists of an oscillator producing an alternating current that passes through a coil producing an alternating magnetic field...
s in the last thirty years has substantially increased the number of coins known from this and indeed all periods. For all that the coins are still relatively rare and minting was primarily confined to the south-east, some were probably struck in Northumbria
Northumbria
Northumbria was a medieval kingdom of the Angles, in what is now Northern England and South-East Scotland, becoming subsequently an earldom in a united Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. The name reflects the approximate southern limit to the kingdom's territory, the Humber Estuary.Northumbria was...
, presumably at York, and both English and Frankish gold coins circulated widely. The arrangements behind minting are also quite obscure, and it cannot automatically be assumed that they were produced as a ‘royal’ coinage: bishops, abbots, lay magnates and perhaps individual moneyers may have provided the driving force behind minting.
Though the early Anglo-Saxon law-codes
Anglo-Saxon law
Anglo-Saxon law is a body of written rules and customs that were in place during the Anglo-Saxon period in England, before the Norman conquest. This body of law, along with early Scandinavian law and continental Germanic law, descended from a family of ancient Germanic custom and legal thought...
must be used with caution for this period, they describe a wide range of compensatory payments in scillingas and scættas from c. 600 onwards. These terms reflect translations of continental legal usage, and may well describe measures of value and/or weight rather than coins as such, yet nonetheless it is probable that the gold tremisses produced in 7th-century England were referred to as scillingas.
The silver boom of c. 675–c. 750: the sceattas
Over the course of the 7th century, the gold content of Anglo-Saxon and Frankish tremisses deteriorated until, in the 660s, they were often only 10-20% pure. Around this point, there was a major shift from debased gold to SilverSilver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
in Merovingian Frankia. However, within a few years of c. 675 very large silver coinages were being struck in southeastern England as well. A few issues, such as those inscribed with the runic name Pada and the Latin Vanimundus, exist in both debased gold and silver, presumably spanning the changeover. The new silver coins are similar to the later tremisses in terms of size and weight: small (typically 10-12mm in diameter), thick and usually weighing 1–1.3g. Because of the references in the law-codes mentioned above, these new silver pieces have been known to numismatists as sceattas
Sceat
Sceattas were small, thick silver coins minted in England, Frisia and Jutland during the Anglo-Saxon period.-History:Their name derives from an Old English word meaning 'wealth', which has been applied to these coins since the seventeenth century, based on interpretations of the law-code of King...
since the 17th century. Contemporary terminology is uncertain, though it is likely that these coins were known as peningas (pennies), just like their later broader equivalents. Silver pennies of roughly this weight (1–1.6g) were to remain the sole unit of English currency until the 13th century, with the exception of rare silver halfpennies
British Half Penny coin
The British decimal half penny was first issued on 15 February 1971, the day the British currency was decimalised. In practice it had been available from banks in bags for some weeks previously....
and even rarer gold coins
Mancus
Mancus was a term used in early medieval Europe to denote either a gold coin, a weight of gold of 4.25g , or a unit of account of thirty silver pence. This made it worth about a months wages for a skilled worker, such as a craftsman or a soldier...
.
The first (‘primary’) sceattas of series A, B and C were largely confined to Kent
Kent
Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...
and the Thames Estuary
Thames Estuary
The Thames Mouth is the estuary in which the River Thames meets the waters of the North Sea.It is not easy to define the limits of the estuary, although physically the head of Sea Reach, near Canvey Island on the Essex shore is probably the western boundary...
, though the emergence of the ‘secondary’ sceattas (probably c. 710) introduced a breathtaking array of new designs and saw minting expand to many new areas: by the middle of the ‘secondary’ phase coins were being struck in Kent, the Thames Estuary, East Anglia
East Anglia
East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...
, eastern Mercia
Mercia
Mercia was one of the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. It was centred on the valley of the River Trent and its tributaries in the region now known as the English Midlands...
, Northumbria
Northumbria
Northumbria was a medieval kingdom of the Angles, in what is now Northern England and South-East Scotland, becoming subsequently an earldom in a united Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. The name reflects the approximate southern limit to the kingdom's territory, the Humber Estuary.Northumbria was...
and Wessex
Wessex
The Kingdom of Wessex or Kingdom of the West Saxons was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the West Saxons, in South West England, from the 6th century, until the emergence of a united English state in the 10th century, under the Wessex dynasty. It was to be an earldom after Canute the Great's conquest...
. Unfortunately, because very few coins bear any form of legend and there was extensive imitation and copying, it is extremely difficult to assign dates and minting-places to many of the types and series identified by modern scholars. These are arranged into lettered series according to the scheme of Stuart Rigold, devised in the 1960s and 70s, and sometimes by the numbers applied to types in the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
catalogues of the 1880s and expanded thereafter to around 150 different varieties. The current chronology, basically laid down by Mark Blackburn in the mid-1980s, rests on the large Cimiez
Cimiez
Cimiez is a neighborhood in Nice, southern France. The area contains the Musée Matisse and the ruins of Cemenelum, capital of the Ancient Roman province Alpes Maritimae on the Ligurian coast...
hoard from southern Gaul, which contained sceattas of several secondary types alongside local issues of named rulers that allowed the hoard to be dated c. 715/20.
There remains much uncertainty about the organisation behind the sceattas and exactly what authorities lay behind minting. Some issues are so large that only major rulers could have been behind them, whilst others are so small that they could well have been the work of an individual moneyer working independently. Others display prominent and sophisticated religious motifs, suggesting that they may have been produced by monasteries or bishops. An exception to the general obscurity of the sceattas comes in Northumbria, where from a very early date the king and (arch)bishop of York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...
played a strong role in coinage production: King Aldfrith
Aldfrith of Northumbria
Aldfrith sometimes Aldfrid, Aldfridus , or Flann Fína mac Ossu , was king of Northumbria from 685 until his death. He is described by early writers such as Bede, Alcuin and Stephen of Ripon as a man of great learning, and some of his works, as well as letters written to him, survive...
was the first English king named on silver coinage anywhere, and his successors retained a relatively tight hold on coinage after production resumed under Eadberht
Eadberht of Northumbria
Eadberht was king of Northumbria from 737 or 738 to 758. He was the brother of Ecgbert, Archbishop of York. His reign is seen as a return to the imperial ambitions of seventh-century Northumbria and may represent a period of economic prosperity. He faced internal opposition from rival dynasties...
.
The early 8th century saw coinage production and circulation on a very impressive scale; greater indeed than at any other point after the 4th and before the 13th century. Some 2,500 finds of sceattas are recorded from England, particularly the east and the south, allowing study on the finer details of circulation and use. Sceattas were also produced and used in the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
and probably Jutland
Jutland
Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming the mainland part of Denmark. It has the North Sea to its west, Kattegat and Skagerrak to its north, the Baltic Sea to its east, and the Danish–German...
. Minting places in the Low Countries such as Dorestad
Dorestad
In the Early Middle Ages, Dorestad was the largest settlement of northwestern Europe. It was a large, flourishing trading place, three kilometers long, situated where the rivers Rhine and Lek diverge southeast of Utrecht in the Netherlands near the modern town of Wijk bij Duurstede...
and Domburg
Domburg
Domburg is a seaside resort on the North Sea, on the northwest coast of Walcheren in the Dutch province of Zeeland. It is a part of the municipality of Veere, and lies about 11 km northwest of the city of Middelburg, the provincial capital.-Demographics:...
supplied a significant proportion of the currency circulating in England at any one time, and were among the most important commercial centres in Europe. Sceattas provide invaluable evidence for the vigour with which trade across the North Sea
North Sea
In the southwest, beyond the Straits of Dover, the North Sea becomes the English Channel connecting to the Atlantic Ocean. In the east, it connects to the Baltic Sea via the Skagerrak and Kattegat, narrow straits that separate Denmark from Norway and Sweden respectively...
was conducted in the early 8th century.
The introduction of the broad penny: Offa and his contemporaries
By the middle of the 8th century, production of sceattas had, as with the thrymsas before them, declined considerably: the last coins of the secondary period are scarce and often debased, and a dearth of coinage is indicated in the record of several archaeological and metal-detecting sites that had been productive for the previous period. Similar problems afflicted the Frankish kingdom too, and around 754/5 King Pippin IIIPippin the Younger
Pepin , called the Short or the Younger , rarely the Great , was the first King of the Franks of the Carolingian dynasty...
(751–68) took the initiative and reformed the Frankish coinage, introducing a new, thinner, broader format (at least 15mm in diameter) struck in much finer silver. Importantly, these new coins all bore the king’s name and (usually) the name of the issuing mint
Mint (coin)
A mint is an industrial facility which manufactures coins for currency.The history of mints correlates closely with the history of coins. One difference is that the history of the mint is usually closely tied to the political situation of an era...
. English rulers followed suit around the same time, and the earliest signs of reform outside Northumbria (where a substantial and relatively high quality silver coinage remained in production, albeit sporadically, over the 8th century) came in East Anglia, where the obscure ruler Beonna reformed the local coinage sometime after he came to the throne in 749. His coins bear the royal name and that of the moneyer, and in fabric are midway between the sceattas and the new Frankish pennies. Initially struck in fine silver, Beonna’s coinage later declined in standard, though one of his moneyers survived to strike some of the earliest coins known for Offa of Mercia
Offa of Mercia
Offa was the King of Mercia from 757 until his death in July 796. The son of Thingfrith and a descendant of Eowa, Offa came to the throne after a period of civil war following the assassination of Æthelbald after defeating the other claimant Beornred. In the early years of Offa's reign it is likely...
.
It was Offa who introduced the broad penny to southumbrian England on a substantial scale, and made the employment of king’s and moneyer’s names standard at least three mints: Canterbury
Canterbury
Canterbury is a historic English cathedral city, which lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a district of Kent in South East England. It lies on the River Stour....
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and somewhere in East Anglia
East Anglia
East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...
. His earliest coins bear an abbreviated version of the royal title influenced by that on the coinage of Pippin III, and on the reverse the moneyer’s name. Early in the course of his coinage (probably in the 760s or 770s) there were also smaller issues at Canterbury in the names of two local Kentish kings, Heaberht
Heaberht of Kent
Heaberht was a King of Kent in the 8th century, ruling jointly with Ecgberht II.Heaberht is known from his coins and from charters of other kings. He witnessed or confirmed two charters of Ecgberht II , one dated 765, as is mentioned in a charter of Offa, King of Mercia , dated 764 ....
(of whom only one coin survives) and Ecgberht II
Egbert II of Kent
Ecgberht II was King of Kent jointly with Heaberht.Ecgberht II is known from his coins and charters, ranging from 765 to 779 , two of which were witnessed or confirmed by Heaberht.Ecgberht II acceded by 765, when he issued his earliest surviving charter...
. Production of broad silver pennies also persisted in East Anglia, commencing in Offa's name but later interrupted by a small coinage struck in the name of King Æthelberht II of East Anglia, who was executed by Offa in 794: only three specimens of his coinage survive today, probably produced in the 780s or 90s.
Offa’s coinage represents one of the high-points of Anglo-Saxon art
Anglo-Saxon art
Anglo-Saxon art covers art produced within the Anglo-Saxon period of English history, beginning with the Migration period style that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them from the continent in the 5th century, and ending in 1066 with the Norman Conquest of a large Anglo-Saxon nation-state whose...
, and indeed they were probably the most artistically accomplished coins produced anywhere in Europe at that time: they stand in sharp contrast with the aniconic coins of contemporary Frankia. Portraits were introduced at an early stage, and were executed in a number of different styles betraying a range of artistic influences drawing on contemporary and Roman sources. Reverse designs included intricate crosses of various types, but the range of Offa's die-cutters encompassed other reverse designs including intertwining serpents, eels and the wolf and twins
Romulus and Remus
Romulus and Remus are Rome's twin founders in its traditional foundation myth, although the former is sometimes said to be the sole founder...
. Uniquely in Anglo-Saxon England, coins were also struck at Canterbury in the name of the queen, Cynethryth
Cynethryth
Cynethryth was the wife of Offa of Mercia and mother of Ecgfrith of Mercia. Cynethryth is the only Anglo-Saxon Queen consort in whose name coinage was definitely issued.-Origins and marriage:...
, from dies produced by the same talented individual responsible for the best of Offa’s portrait dies. This practice could have been inspired by encounters with Roman coins in the names of empresses. It is also possible, though less likely, that the appearance of Irene
Irene (empress)
Irene Sarantapechaina , known as Irene of Athens or Irene the Athenian was a Byzantine empress regnant from 797 to 802, having previously been empress consort from 775 to 780, and empress dowager and regent from 780 to 797. It is often claimed she called herself "basileus" , 'emperor'...
on Byzantine coinage
Byzantine coinage
Byzantine currency, money used in the Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of the West, consisted of mainly two types of coins: the gold solidus and a variety of clearly valued bronze coins...
led Offa’s queen to place her image on coins as well. Certainly Cynethryth emerges from surviving evidence as a formidable individual, who regularly witnessed contemporary charters immediately after her husband, was responsible for the running of his household and survived him to become a powerful abbess.
As with the sceattas considerable problems surround knowledge of exactly how the new coinage was organised and implemented. It is possible that the pennies of Offa’s reign still reflect the vestiges of the organisation behind the complex sceattas, with the diverse designs often varying from moneyer to moneyer. Other authorities exerted minting rights in his reign that may have been held for some time: the Bishop of London
Bishop of London
The Bishop of London is the ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of London in the Province of Canterbury.The diocese covers 458 km² of 17 boroughs of Greater London north of the River Thames and a small part of the County of Surrey...
(Eadberht
Eadberht
Eadberht is an Anglo-Saxon male name. It may refer to:*Eadberht of Lincoln*Eadberht of Lindisfarne*Eadberht of Northumbria*Eadberht of Selsey*Eadbert I of Kent*Eadberht II of Kent*Eadberht III Præn of Kent*Eadberht...
) is named on some coins, the only pennies struck in the name of an Anglo-Saxon bishop outside York and Canterbury; and in Canterbury the archbishops Iænberht
Jaenbert
Jænberht was a medieval monk, and later the abbot, of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury who was named Archbishop of Canterbury in 765. As archbishop, he had a difficult relationship with King Offa of Mercia, who at one point confiscated lands from the archbishopric...
(765–92) and Æthelheard
Æthelhard
Æthelhard was a Bishop of Winchester then an Archbishop of Canterbury in medieval England. Appointed by King Offa of Mercia, Æthelhard had difficulties with both the Kentish monarchs and with a rival archiepiscopate in southern England, and was deposed around 796 by King Eadberht III Præn of Kent...
(793–805) struck both independently and with Offa. Similarly, dating the reforms that brought this new penny coinage into being is contentious. It appears likely that production started at roughly the same time at London, Canterbury and East Anglia, perhaps c. 765–70, and the bulk of the coinage – including the portrait coinage – was probably produced in the 770s and 80s. Later in Offa’s reign there was a second reform in which the weight was raised, the size of the flan increased and a common non-portrait design introduced at all three mints. This ‘heavy coinage’ can be closely dated, for no examples of it are known in the name of Archbishop Iænberht, whilst there are no ‘light’ (i.e., pre-reform) pennies of Archbishop Æthelheard, indicating that the reform took place in 792 or 3.
The coins of Offa provide valuable evidence for a new dimension of royal authority and action with regard to the coinage, and have received much attention from historians because of their impressive imagery and range of royal titulature: Offa is variously entitled REX, REX M(erciorum), REX MERCIORU(m) and probably REX A(nglorum).
The 9th century
After Offa’s death in 796, usurpers in Kent and East Anglia – Eadbearht PrænEadberht III Præn
Eadberht III Præn was the King of Kent from 796 to 798. His brief reign was the result of a rebellion against the hegemony of Mercia, and it marked the last time that Kent existed as an independent kingdom....
and Eadwald
Eadwald of East Anglia
Eadwald of East Anglia was the king of East Anglia c. 796-798. Eadwald was probably in exile during the oppressive reign of Offa . After the death of Offa of Mercia, who had ruled East Anglia directly since deposing and beheading its king Aethelberht in 796...
– took power and issued coins in their own names, following the design of Offa’ heavy coinage. After a small issue at London based on this same type, the new Mercian ruler Coenwulf
Coenwulf of Mercia
Coenwulf was King of Mercia from December 796 to 821. He was a descendant of a brother of King Penda, who had ruled Mercia in the middle of the 7th century. He succeeded Ecgfrith, the son of Offa; Ecgfrith only reigned for five months, with Coenwulf coming to the throne in the same year that Offa...
instituted a reform of the coinage leading to the new tribrach type. This non-portrait type used an obverse design modelled on the earlier coinage of Cynethryth, and despite its use of the central M (for Merciorum) was adopted by Eadbearht, Eadwald and even by Beorhtric of Wessex
Beorhtric of Wessex
Beorhtric was the King of Wessex from 786 to 802.In 786, Cynewulf, king of Wessex, was killed by the exiled noble Cyneheard, brother of the former King Sigeberht. Beorhtric's successful bid for the throne was supported by Offa, king of the Mercians against Egbert...
, who struck a very rare coinage around this time.
By 798 Coenwulf had regained Kent and East Anglia also came back under his power by the 9th century. He appointed a sub-ruler for Kent – his brother Cuthred
Cuthred of Kent
Cuðred was a King of Kent .After the revolt of Kent under Eadberht III Præn was defeated in 798 by Cœnwulf, he established Cuðred as a client king...
– in whose name coins were struck at Canterbury. Cuthred and his brother may have minted simultaneously in the cross-and-wedges portrait type current from around 805, but it is equally possible that they had sole control of the mint one after the other.
Around the same time, the archiepiscopal coinage at Canterbury also changed: the new archbishop, Wulfred
Wulfred
Wulfred was an Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury in medieval England. Nothing is known of his life prior to 803, when he attended a church council, but he was probably a nobleman from Middlesex. He was elected archbishop in 805 and spent his time in office reforming the clergy of his cathedral...
, was very eager to assert his ecclesiastical rights, even at the expense of the king, and instituted an archiepiscopal portrait coinage bearing no reference at all to Coenwulf. This attractive series was modelled on the silver denarii produced by Pope Hadrian I
Pope Adrian I
Pope Adrian was pope from February 1, 772 to December 25, 795. He was the son of Theodore, a Roman nobleman.Shortly after Adrian's accession the territory ruled by the papacy was invaded by Desiderius, king of the Lombards, and Adrian was compelled to seek the assistance of the Frankish king...
(772–95).
Coenwulf continued a portrait coinage for the rest of his reign at Canterbury, London, East Anglia and, from c. 810, at a new mint located at Rochester in Kent. Canterbury came to dominate silver coin production, and whilst East Anglia and Rochester remained relatively stable, pennies from London become very rare: despite the recent discovery of a gold coin of Coenwulf with the legend DE VICO LVNDONIAE it is clear that the mint of London was in decline by around 800.
In the years between Coenwulf's death in 821 and Egbert of Wessex's
Egbert of Wessex
Egbert was King of Wessex from 802 until his death in 839. His father was Ealhmund of Kent...
conquest of Kent and the south-east in 825, the mint at Canterbury weathered a turbulent period that is better reflected in the coins than any written source. Coenwulf’s brother and successor Ceolwulf I
Ceolwulf I of Mercia
Ceolwulf I was King of Mercia and Kent, from 821 to 823. He was the brother of Cœnwulf, his predecessor, and was deposed by Beornwulf.-External links:* http://www.anglo-saxons.net/hwaet/?do=seek&query=S+186...
held Kent, but coins in his name from Canterbury are very rare and struck by only a few of the full complement of moneyers. Nonetheless, his short reign provides evidence of quite strong interest in the coinage, and several types common to a number of mints were introduced: a feature not seen in the latter part of his predecessor's reign. The largest of these new types even encompassed the normally distinct East Anglian mint. Rochester became far more productive under Ceolwulf, perhaps to compensate for lower royal production at Canterbury. It looks like the greater part of Canterbury’s coinage from the years c. 822-4 consists of ‘anonymous’ pennies bearing a royal- or archiepiscopal-style portrait surrounded by the moneyer’s name and the mint name (Dorobernia civitas) on the reverse. No reference is made to any king or archbishop. This fascinating coinage seems to reflect a time when the moneyers were uncertain of whose authority to recognise, probably around Ceolwulf’s deposition in 823 by Beornwulf
Beornwulf of Mercia
Beornwulf was King of Mercia from 823 to 825. His short reign saw the collapse of the Mercia's supremacy over the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy....
. No Kentish coins are known in his name, but there are many in the name of one Baldred
Baldred of Kent
Baldred was a king of Kent, until 825, when he was expelled by Æthelwulf, son of King Egbert of Wessex, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "because formerly they had been wrongly forced away from their allegiance to his kinsmen"....
, who was probably another Mercian sub-ruler of Kent, though this is difficult to tell for certain from the very scanty written records of this period. However, it is known that when Egbert of Wessex and his son Æthelwulf invaded Kent in 825 they put Baldred to flight and imposed their own rule.
Egbert’s campaign of conquest took him far beyond Kent and even through Mercia to the borders of Northumbria in 829-30. Unusually, this dramatic military success was reflected in an issue of coinage from London, with Egbert named REX M(erciorum). This is one of very few cases in Anglo-Saxon England where it looks like coinage was being used in a propagandistic way: design and production was not as closely tied to politics and current events as in the classical or modern period.
After these conquests Egbert retreated and consolidated his position in the south-east, leaving Mercia to Wiglaf
Wiglaf of Mercia
Wiglaf was King of Mercia from 827 to 829 and again from 830 until his death. His ancestry is uncertain: the 820s were a period of dynastic conflict within Mercia and the genealogy of several of the kings of this time is unknown...
, who struck very a very rare coinage at London, now the only mint available to the kings of Mercia. Egbert's coinage from Kent at first continued the pattern of Baldred’s, but was reformed c. 828 to introduce a new reverse monogram type, retaining a portrait of the king on the obverse. Archiepiscopal minting was interrupted immediately after the West Saxon takeover, but resumed shortly before Wulfred’s death using the same monogram reverse as the royal coinage in conjunction with an archiepiscopal name and bust on the obverse; a type that continued under Wulfred’s successor Ceolnoth
Ceolnoth
-Biography:Gervase of Canterbury says that Ceolnoth was Dean of the see of Canterbury previous to being elected to the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury, but this story has no confirmation in contemporary records. Ceolnoth was consecrated archbishop on 27 July 833...
, who came to power in 833.
The 9th century saw the spread of minting beyond the south-east, which had dominated production outside Northumbria since the end of the sceattas. The West Saxon mint initiated by Beorhtric continued to operate at a relatively low level under Egbert but remained very sporadic in operation between his death and Alfred
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great was King of Wessex from 871 to 899.Alfred is noted for his defence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of southern England against the Vikings, becoming the only English monarch still to be accorded the epithet "the Great". Alfred was the first King of the West Saxons to style himself...
’s reign later in the 9th century. In East Anglia, coinage gradually became more substantial under the last Mercian rulers and, from c. 825, under a series of independent rulers: Æthelstan, Æthelweard
Æthelweard of East Anglia
Æthelweard was a 9th century king of East Anglia, the long-lived Anglo-Saxon kingdom which today includes the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Little is known of Æthelweard's reign and even his regnal dates are not known for certain...
and (St) Edmund
Edmund the Martyr
St Edmund the Martyr was a king of East Anglia, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom which today includes the English counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.D'Evelyn, Charlotte, and Mill, Anna J., , 1956. Reprinted 1967...
. These kings mainly issued non-portrait pennies bearing a large central A, and other designs which were often particular to individual moneyers, though produced by a common die-cutter. When first adopted under Coenwulf, this central A probably represented part of an Alpha-Omega pair, but in East Anglia more likely signified Angli or (rex) Anglorum.
Under Æthelwulf, minting remained buoyant at Canterbury and Rochester and continued in the name of Archbishop Ceolnoth
Ceolnoth
-Biography:Gervase of Canterbury says that Ceolnoth was Dean of the see of Canterbury previous to being elected to the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury, but this story has no confirmation in contemporary records. Ceolnoth was consecrated archbishop on 27 July 833...
throughout the period. A succession of four phases can be distinguished at these two mints. At Canterbury the first was a non-portrait coinage bearing the legend REX SAXONIORVM, inspired by Egbert’s West Saxon coinage; and a new portrait coinage bearing a wide range of reverse designs came second. At Rochester, the first type comprised a portrait element with diverse reverse designs struck by the royal moneyers, and also a probably episcopal element which does not name a moneyer or carry a portrait, but does bear the unusually long royal title REX OCCIDENTALIVM SAXONVM. In the second phase the episcopal coinage ceases and a non-portrait type was adopted by the royal moneyers. The last two phases of Æthelwulf’s coinage were common to both Rochester and Canterbury, with dies for both mints in the final phase coming from a common source at Canterbury. The third type of Æthelwulf’s reign was a non-portrait coinage with the ambiguous mint legend DORIBI (which could refer to either Canterbury, Dorobernia; or Rochester, Dorobrebia) and a monogram for CANT(ia). Æthelwulf’s last coinage was a new portrait type of very different style. This inscribed cross type may have only come into production after several years without coinage at Canterbury: just two moneyers from there and from Rochester survived from earlier types, possibly because of the Viking raid on Kent recorded in 851. This new coinage survived into the reign of Æthelwulf’s son Æthelberht (no genuine coins are known of Æthelbald, who ruled 858–60) under whom it became very substantial: about forty moneyers are known to have produced it. Another new portrait type, the short-lived floreate cross type, also appeared at the end of his reign but survives in very small numbers today. Since the inscribed cross type is known largely thanks to a large hoard discovered at Dorking
Dorking
Dorking is a historic market town at the foot of the North Downs approximately south of London, in Surrey, England.- History and development :...
in the early 19th century and is found only rarely otherwise, it may be that the floreate cross coinage too was once much more substantial than its modern survival rate appears to indicate. The inscribed cross coinage is notable for the onset of major debasement, the centralisation of die-cutting for Canterbury and Rochester, and for a massive increase in the number of moneyers, so that almost 50 are known from the time of Æthelberht. These changes probably reflect the onset of a new and more intense royal management of the coinage, which was to be expanded under Æthelberht's successors.
In the reign of Berhtwulf of Mercia
Beorhtwulf of Mercia
Beorhtwulf was King of the Mercians from 839 or 840 to 852. His ancestry is unknown, though he may have been connected to Beornwulf, who ruled Mercia in the 820s...
(c. 840–52) minting at London, Mercia’s only remaining mint, began again in earnest, around the time of Æthelwulf’s second phase of coinage in the mid 840s. A mixture of portrait and non-portrait types was struck. Because of the long abeyance of the London mint, considerable support came from West Saxon Rochester in the form of dies and even moneyers, and it is possible that some coins in Berhtwulf’s name were actually produced in Rochester. It was once thought that this monetary co-operation was reflected in a unique penny bearing the name of Æthelwulf on one face and that of Berhtwulf on the other. However, this coin more likely represents an unofficial production without any particular political significance.
The recovery of Mercian minting was made most manifest by the adoption in Wessex of the ‘lunettes’ type first struck at London by Berhtwulf’s successor Burgred
Burgred of Mercia
Burgred or Burhred or Burghred was the king of Mercia .-Rule:Burgred succeeded to the throne in 852, and in 852 or 853 called upon Ethelwulf of Wessex to aid him in subduing northern Wales. The request was granted and the campaign proved successful, the alliance being sealed by the marriage of...
. This coinage survives in very large numbers thanks to a great increase in minting, especially in the latter part of Burgred's reign: about twenty moneyers are known for Alfred
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great was King of Wessex from 871 to 899.Alfred is noted for his defence of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of southern England against the Vikings, becoming the only English monarch still to be accorded the epithet "the Great". Alfred was the first King of the West Saxons to style himself...
and 35–40 for Burgred. This period is particularly well known thanks to the discovery of a large number of hoards, presumably associated with Viking
Viking
The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century.These Norsemen used their famed longships to...
raids. This coinage is very difficult to organise or categorise in any meaningful way. However, the lunettes type had become very debased by the early 870s when production was probably at its highest, and another reform was initiated in the mid 870s by Alfred (‘the Great’) of Wessex. This introduced the heavier, finer cross-and-lozenge type after a number of very rare and interesting experimental issues were struck in the years around the reform. At London, which lay within the Mercian kingdom, Alfred was initially recognised as king of Mercia as well as Wessex after the deposition of Burgred in 873/4, and was even called REX ANG(lorum) on one of two known examples of the two emperors portrait penny type. The other specimen of this fascinating type is in the name of Ceolwulf II
Ceolwulf II of Mercia
Ceolwulf II was the last king of the Mercians. He succeeded Burgred of Mercia who was deposed in 874.-Dynastic background:...
, the new Mercian king installed by the Vikings. Ceolwulf also struck pennies of the cross and type, and the earliest known round English halfpenny
British Half Penny coin
The British decimal half penny was first issued on 15 February 1971, the day the British currency was decimalised. In practice it had been available from banks in bags for some weeks previously....
belongs to this phase of coinage.
Further reforms were initiated by Alfred later in his reign. Around 880, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
struck an innovative series of portrait pennies bearing Alfred’s portrait and, on the reverse, a Monogram
Monogram
A monogram is a motif made by overlapping or combining two or more letters or other graphemes to form one symbol. Monograms are often made by combining the initials of an individual or a company, used as recognizable symbols or logos. A series of uncombined initials is properly referred to as a...
of Lundonia. Later one moneyer, Tilewine, placed his name on the reverse as well, but this coinage was for the most part struck without moneyers' names. The main type struck in the latter part of Alfred’s reign, however, was the non-portrait two line type. Again, a few different and perhaps experimental types have survived in small numbers. These include a portrait coin – probably from around the same time as the London monogram pennies – with the mint-name ÆT GLEAPA (‘from Gloucester
Gloucester
Gloucester is a city, district and county town of Gloucestershire in the South West region of England. Gloucester lies close to the Welsh border, and on the River Severn, approximately north-east of Bristol, and south-southwest of Birmingham....
’), which had become an important centre of ‘English’ Mercia under Alfred’s ealdorman Æthelred; a small number of ‘four-line’ non-portrait pennies with reverse mint names assigning their production to Winchester and Exeter; another non-portrait series probably struck at Oxford (OHSNAFORDA); and large silver ‘offering pieces’ inscribed ELIMOSINA (‘alms’).
Northumbria’s numismatic history was quite distinct from that of the south. Coinage never petered out as completely as it did below the Humber, and until close to the end of its history Northumbrian coinage remained closely linked to the king and archbishop. However, debasement became a serious issue around the end of the 8th century, when numismatists begin to apply the term stycas to Northumbrian coinage (based on a 10th-century gloss
Gloss
A gloss is a brief notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text, or in the reader's language if that is different....
in the Lindisfarne Gospels
Lindisfarne Gospels
The Lindisfarne Gospels is an illuminated Latin manuscript of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the British Library...
; contemporary terminology is unknown). Both the political and the numismatic chronology of this period is very confused, with many accounts and suggestions competing with one another. By the middle of the 9th century Northumbrian coinage contained almost no silver and was being produced on a massive scale: many tens of thousands of coins are known today, and several very large hoards have been found, such as one from the churchyard in Hexham which contained some 8000 stycas. After a final phase of considerable disorganisation, the stycas were phased out by the Scandinavian rulers who took over Northumbria in 867, and replaced with a new penny coinage on the model of coinage in the Carolingian empire and southumbrian England. Two exceptional coins illustrate that Northumbrian coinage in the 9th century may not have been entirely composed of stycas: a gold Mancus
Mancus
Mancus was a term used in early medieval Europe to denote either a gold coin, a weight of gold of 4.25g , or a unit of account of thirty silver pence. This made it worth about a months wages for a skilled worker, such as a craftsman or a soldier...
survives in the name of Archbishop Wigmund
Wigmund
Wigmund was a medieval Archbishop of York.Wigmund was consecrated in 837 and died in 854.-External links:*...
, modelled on contemporary gold solidi of Louis the Pious
Louis the Pious
Louis the Pious , also called the Fair, and the Debonaire, was the King of Aquitaine from 781. He was also King of the Franks and co-Emperor with his father, Charlemagne, from 813...
; and a silver penny found in the Cornish Trewhiddle
Trewhiddle
Trewhiddle is a small settlement in south Cornwall, United Kingdom. It lies in the civil parish of Pentewan Valley and the ecclesiastical parish of St Austell. The nearest town is St Austell, approximately one mile to the north.-Manor of Trewhiddle:...
hoard of c. 868 in the name of EANRED REX, with an anomalous reverse legend apparently reading ĐES MONETA (‘his coin’(?)) followed by an Omega. The latter coin has still not been conclusively fitted into context: its style suggests production around 850, but Eanred of Northumbria
Eanred of Northumbria
Eanred was king of Northumbria in the early ninth century.Very little is known for certain about Eanred. The only reference made by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to the Northumbrians in this period is the statement that in 829 Egbert of Wessex...
probably died in 840. It may therefore be either a posthumous commemorative issue of some sort, or a survivor of a very rare Southumbrian coinage in the name of an otherwise forgotten ruler.
Viking coinages
VikingViking
The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century.These Norsemen used their famed longships to...
settlers in England found themselves in a more sophisticated coin-using economy than they were accustomed to at home; consequently it is unsurprising that the first coins that can be associated with the Vikings in England are imitations of Alfred’s coinage, particularly the ‘London monogram’ and ‘two-line’ types. These are very numerous today, and for a long time caused great difficulty for numismatists working on Alfred’s coinage, who could not always tell them from the genuine issues. However, before the end of the 9th century new silver coinages had begun in East Anglia and at York. In East Anglia, a coinage was struck in imitation of Alfred’s in the name of Guthrum (with his baptismal name Æthelstan), followed by a very large coinage naming the martyred Saint Edmund
Edmund the Martyr
St Edmund the Martyr was a king of East Anglia, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom which today includes the English counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.D'Evelyn, Charlotte, and Mill, Anna J., , 1956. Reprinted 1967...
on the obverse, which was struck by at least sixty moneyers (the bulk of them bearing names indicating continental origins). This coinage persisted until the conquest of East Anglia by Edward the Elder
Edward the Elder
Edward the Elder was an English king. He became king in 899 upon the death of his father, Alfred the Great. His court was at Winchester, previously the capital of Wessex...
in 917/18. In Northumbria, the highly debased styca coinage came to an end and was replaced with a fine silver coinage, which is very well known thanks to the huge (c. 8,000 coin) Cuerdale
Cuerdale
Cuerdale is a civil parish in the South Ribble district of Lancashire, England. It includes Cuerdale Hall and has no substantive settlements. It originated as a township in the parish of Blackburn, becoming a separate civil parish in 1866...
hoard deposited in the first decade of the 10th century.
Sometimes this coinage named local Viking rulers (the identification of whom with figures from written sources is often impossible or contentious) but, at the start of the 10th century, the name of the mint and that of Saint Peter
Saint Peter
Saint Peter or Simon Peter was an early Christian leader, who is featured prominently in the New Testament Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. The son of John or of Jonah and from the village of Bethsaida in the province of Galilee, his brother Andrew was also an apostle...
replaced references to king and moneyer. From the 910s the York coinage resumed naming the ruler and also began to display a range of interesting devices connected to the Scandinavian presence in York: swords, hammers, banners and a bird variously interpreted as a raven or dove. The York pennies of Anlaf/Olaf Guthfrithson
Olaf III Guthfrithson
Amlaíb mac Gofraid , a member of the Norse-Gael Uí Ímair dynasty, was King of Dublin from 934 to 941...
(939–41) present the first known use of Old Norse in the Latin alphabet anywhere in the legend ANLAF CVNVNGIR (‘King Anlaf’).
Although Northumbria and East Anglia were the main bastions of Viking coinage, at various times there was also production in the East Midlands, for instance of coins naming Saint Martin
Martin of Tours
Martin of Tours was a Bishop of Tours whose shrine became a famous stopping-point for pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Around his name much legendary material accrued, and he has become one of the most familiar and recognizable Christian saints...
at Lincoln
Lincoln, Lincolnshire
Lincoln is a cathedral city and county town of Lincolnshire, England.The non-metropolitan district of Lincoln has a population of 85,595; the 2001 census gave the entire area of Lincoln a population of 120,779....
.
The 10th century
The coinage of Edward the ElderEdward the Elder
Edward the Elder was an English king. He became king in 899 upon the death of his father, Alfred the Great. His court was at Winchester, previously the capital of Wessex...
in some ways continued the types and organisation current under his father Alfred in Wessex and English Mercia, but with the expansion of West Saxon control into the Midlands and East Anglia
East Anglia
East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...
the currency system became more complex as new regions were incorporated into Edward’s kingdom. For the most part the coinage was non-portrait and simple in design, though some mints in English Mercia
Mercia
Mercia was one of the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. It was centred on the valley of the River Trent and its tributaries in the region now known as the English Midlands...
struck an interesting series of pictorial reverse types. Since mint names are again very rare, attributions must largely be made by working backwards from Æthelstan
Athelstan of England
Athelstan , called the Glorious, was the King of England from 924 or 925 to 939. He was the son of King Edward the Elder, grandson of Alfred the Great and nephew of Æthelflæd of Mercia...
’s reign when mint names were often found on coins of the circumscription cross and bust crowned types. These coinages, struck at about thirty named mints after the conquest of the kingdom of York
Jórvík
Scandinavian York is a term, like the terms Kingdom of Jórvík or Kingdom of York, used by historians for the kingdom of Northumbria in the late 9th century and first half of the 10th century, when it was dominated by Norse warrior-kings; in particular, it is used to refer to the city controlled by...
in 927, reflect a renewed effort on the king’s part to have a single, centrally controlled coinage spanning the kingdom: types were standardised, the royal title was expanded from the usual REX to REX SAXONUM or even REX TO(tius) BRIT(anniae), as one finds in contemporary charters. It was also under Æthelstan that coinage was first mentioned in any detail in legal documentation: a law-code issued by him at Grateley
Grateley
Grateley is a small village in the north west of Hampshire, England.Grateley lies just to the South of the pre-historic hillfort of Quarley Hill. The Parish covers with 607 people living in 250 dwellings. The village has two shops, two pubs, a thirteenth century church Grateley is a small village...
(probably around 926-30 though incorporating numismatic data from somewhat earlier) details the acceptance of a single currency and penalties for forgery, and goes on to list a series of minting places and the number of moneyers permitted to each.
Towards the end of Æthelstan’s reign and in the time of his successors Edmund
Edmund I of England
Edmund I , called the Elder, the Deed-doer, the Just, or the Magnificent, was King of England from 939 until his death. He was a son of Edward the Elder and half-brother of Athelstan. Athelstan died on 27 October 939, and Edmund succeeded him as king.-Military threats:Shortly after his...
, Eadred, Eadwig and the first part of Edgar
Edgar of England
Edgar the Peaceful, or Edgar I , also called the Peaceable, was a king of England . Edgar was the younger son of Edmund I of England.-Accession:...
’s reign, the coinage was of a regionalised character, with up to seven regions of monetary circulation. The structure of this system is clearest for northern England thanks to the discovery of more numerous hoards in that part of the country. Coins normally stayed within their area of production, and different types were current in each region. However, these regions were not static, and many of the 'regional' types were, to the untrained eye, comparatively similar. The predominant type bore the king's name in circumscription on the obverse (normally around a small cross), and the moneyer's name in two lines with various ornaments on the reverse. At various times a circumscription reverse was also used, which gave scope for a longer legend; or a portrait obverse. For reasons unknown, East Anglia in particular favoured royal portraits between the 930s and 970s, though it was also used sporadically elsewhere. Mints are not normally named, but it is usually possible to attribute coins to their region of origin. However, despite the regionalised types and circulation of coinage, pennies remained of relatively stable size, weight and fineness, and most importantly were always struck in the name of the West Saxon king. Even when the kingdom was divided between Eadwig and Edgar in 957, coinage seems to have remained the preserve of Eadwig, the senior partner in rule, even in the mint towns ruled by Edgar.
The last phase of this regionalised coinage, struck in the first decade of Edgar’s sole reign, produced a number of unusual features. Mint names became more common, and there were a number of appropriations from earlier English coinage, such as a resurrection of Alfred’s London monogram on halfpennies and Æthelstan’s royal title REX TO(tius) BRIT(anniae). This revival of interest in the coinage foreshadowed an even greater reform at the end of Edgar’s reign.
Edgar’s reform, c. 973 and the late Anglo-Saxon coinage
Exactly when EdgarEdgar of England
Edgar the Peaceful, or Edgar I , also called the Peaceable, was a king of England . Edgar was the younger son of Edmund I of England.-Accession:...
reformed the coinage is not certain: that it was towards the end of his reign is clear from the coins, and the only help provided by written sources is a reference in Roger of Wendover
Roger of Wendover
Roger of Wendover , probably a native of Wendover in Buckinghamshire, was an English chronicler of the 13th century.At an uncertain date he became a monk at St Albans Abbey; afterwards he was appointed prior of the cell of Belvoir, but he forfeited this dignity in the early years of Henry III,...
’s 13th-century chronicle, which implies the reform may have taken place in or after 973. Its impact, however, cannot be underestimated, and it formed the basis of the English coinage until the reign of Henry II
Henry II of England
Henry II ruled as King of England , Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Duke of Gascony, Count of Nantes, Lord of Ireland and, at various times, controlled parts of Wales, Scotland and western France. Henry, the great-grandson of William the Conqueror, was the...
. Old coins disappeared from circulation and a single standardised type was introduced at around forty mints across the country, bearing the royal portrait and title on the obverse and the names of moneyer and mint around a small central cross on the reverse. Initially, too, all new dies were distributed from a single die-cutting centre located at Winchester
Winchester
Winchester is a historic cathedral city and former capital city of England. It is the county town of Hampshire, in South East England. The city lies at the heart of the wider City of Winchester, a local government district, and is located at the western end of the South Downs, along the course of...
. Such centralisation was unusual, and occurred in only a few of the other types that came after: more commonly, the same type was used throughout the country but die production devolved to a number of regional die-cutting centres which distributed dies to nearby, smaller mints. Even within the nine-month reign of Harold II
Harold Godwinson
Harold Godwinson was the last Anglo-Saxon King of England.It could be argued that Edgar the Atheling, who was proclaimed as king by the witan but never crowned, was really the last Anglo-Saxon king...
in 1066 coins were struck with a new design in his name at forty-eight mints. Around seventy places in England (and in Wales under the Normans
Normans
The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
) were active as mints during this period, ranging hugely in size and productivity: the largest was London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, though York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...
and Lincoln remained important throughout the period, and other major mints included Winchester
Winchester
Winchester is a historic cathedral city and former capital city of England. It is the county town of Hampshire, in South East England. The city lies at the heart of the wider City of Winchester, a local government district, and is located at the western end of the South Downs, along the course of...
, Norwich
Norwich
Norwich is a city in England. It is the regional administrative centre and county town of Norfolk. During the 11th century, Norwich was the largest city in England after London, and one of the most important places in the kingdom...
and Stamford
Stamford, Lincolnshire
Stamford is a town and civil parish within the South Kesteven district of the county of Lincolnshire, England. It is approximately to the north of London, on the east side of the A1 road to York and Edinburgh and on the River Welland...
. At the other end of the scale are places that were never important mints in the Anglo-Saxon period and are little more than villages, hillforts and market towns today, including Melton Mowbray
Melton Mowbray
Melton Mowbray is a town in the Melton borough of Leicestershire, England. It is to the northeast of Leicester, and southeast of Nottingham...
, Milborne Port
Milborne Port
Milborne Port is a village and civil parish in Somerset, England, east of Sherborne, and in the South Somerset district. It has a population of 2,735...
, Castle Gotha, Cadbury Castle
Cadbury Castle, Somerset
Cadbury Castle is an Iron Age hill fort in the civil parish of South Cadbury in the English county of Somerset. It is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and associated with King Arthur.-Background:...
and Dunwich
Dunwich
Dunwich is a small town in Suffolk, England, within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB.Dunwich was the capital of East Anglia 1500 years ago but the harbour and most of the town have since disappeared due to coastal erosion. Its decline began in 1286 when a sea surge hit the East Anglian coast, and...
. Mints of this kind were often only active during short periods, such as a number of 'emergency' mints set up during the reign of Æthelred II because of Viking depredations.
The designs chosen for the coinage were relatively uniform, following the pattern of Edgar’s reformed pennies: the obverse carried some form of royal portrait as well as the royal name and title, whilst the reverse gave the name of the moneyer and the mint around some form of cross. Within this format, however, there was much variation. Portraits could face either way and reflect a wide range of influences. Under Æthelred II, for instance, one type was based upon early 4th-century Roman coins showing the emperor in military garb, with helmet and armour; another was based on civilian portraits of other 4th-century emperors without any form of headgear. Under Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor also known as St. Edward the Confessor , son of Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy, was one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England and is usually regarded as the last king of the House of Wessex, ruling from 1042 to 1066....
there was strong German influence in the portraits from the last fifteen years or so of his reign, perhaps as a result of Edward’s employment of German goldsmith
Goldsmith
A goldsmith is a metalworker who specializes in working with gold and other precious metals. Since ancient times the techniques of a goldsmith have evolved very little in order to produce items of jewelry of quality standards. In modern times actual goldsmiths are rare...
s named Theoderic and Otto. These show the king bearded, helmeted and crowned, and in some cases even facing straight forward or seated on a throne.
The existence of moneyer and mint names on each and every coin provide valuable evidence for the study of not only mint structure (in terms of how productive certain moneyers were, or how many shared dies) but also of contemporary naming patterns and – to some extent – the makeup of the population. Mints located in the old Danelaw, like York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...
and Lincoln
Lincoln, Lincolnshire
Lincoln is a cathedral city and county town of Lincolnshire, England.The non-metropolitan district of Lincoln has a population of 85,595; the 2001 census gave the entire area of Lincoln a population of 120,779....
, contained a preponderance of moneyers with Scandinavian
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
names, whilst one sometimes comes across moneyers all over the country with continental names, or even more exotic names in Old Irish
Old Irish language
Old Irish is the name given to the oldest form of the Goidelic languages for which extensive written texts are extant. It was used from the 6th to the 10th centuries, by which time it had developed into Middle Irish....
.
This first type, usually known as the First small cross or Reform type, remained in currency for Edgar’s last years, the whole of Edward the Martyr
Edward the Martyr
Edward the Martyr was king of the English from 975 until he was murdered in 978. Edward was the eldest son of King Edgar, but not his father's acknowledged heir...
’s short reign and even into the first years of Æthelred II, who came to the throne in 978/9. At some point early in his reign, however, another of the features that was to characterise the late Anglo-Saxon currency system came into play: the first of many changes of type. More than fifty such changes occurred during the existence of the coinage as reformed by Edgar, which persisted until the 1150s. Within the reign of Æthelred, for instance, six such changes can be seen, manifested in the progression of the following types: First Small cross; First hand; Second hand; Crux; Long Cross; Helmet; Last Small cross. After the death of Cnut, under whom another three types (Quatrefoil, Helmet and Short cross) were struck, types become more numerous and changes presumably more frequent: fourteen types were struck in the years between 1035 and the Norman Conquest
Norman conquest of England
The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of England by William, Duke of Normandy. William became known as William the Conqueror after his victory at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, defeating King Harold II of England...
of 1066, probably lasting only two or three years each. It is presumed that each change of type required coins of old money to be exchanged for new, with the king and the moneyer taking a cut either as a portion of the value of the new coins or from the minting process. The weight of the coinage varied considerably, even within types, suggesting that there may have been some profit taken in minting by extracting silver from the coinage, though within the kingdom of England it would have been possible to enforce that all coins be accepted at face value regardless of weight. Hoard evidence, at least from before the 1030s, suggests that reminting of the whole coinage was stipulated at each change of type, for a number of hoards survive consisting of only one type. Alongside these, however, are ‘savings’ hoards, which contain a mixture of two or more types; and a mixture of types becomes much more common in hoards from after the 1030s. One possible explanation for this change in the pattern of production and hoarding is that it came to be the rule, after the 1030s, that only payments to the crown had to be in the current type, whereas other types of English coinage were viable for other purposes.
Remarkably little written evidence survives to help numismatists and historians understand how the coinage and its system of changes of type actually functioned. Domesday Book
Domesday Book
Domesday Book , now held at The National Archives, Kew, Richmond upon Thames in South West London, is the record of the great survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086...
does record that moneyers at certain mints had to go to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
to purchase new dies for twenty shillings quando moneta vertebatur (‘when the coinage was changed’), and that certain towns paid annual sums to the king for the privilege of running a mint. At several towns bishops and abbots had rights to the profits of one or more moneyers (which normally went to the king), but these are no longer reflected by any changes in the design of the coins.
Numismatists have sometimes tried to discern a very rigid system of organisation in the late Anglo-Saxon coinage: one, Michael Dolley, believed that until the death of Cnut in 1035, each type lasted six years, with a few exceptions – such as the Last Small Cross type at the end of Æthelred’s reign – lasting longer under very unusual conditions. Some features seem to support this belief, at least for the earlier period. Certain changes of type apparently coincided with datable historic events: no coins of the Helmet type survive from the mint of Wilton
Wilton, Wiltshire
Wilton is a town in Wiltshire, , England, with a rich heritage dating back to the Anglo-Saxons. Today it is dwarfed by its larger and more famous neighbour, Salisbury, but still has a range of notable shops and attractions, including Wilton House.The confluence of the rivers Wylye and Nadder is at...
, for instance, whereas no coins of the preceding Long Cross type are known from nearby Salisbury
Salisbury
Salisbury is a cathedral city in Wiltshire, England and the only city in the county. It is the second largest settlement in the county...
, but moneyers with the same names as those from Wilton started to operate there in the Helmet type. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the Chronicle was created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alfred the Great...
records that in 1003 Wilton was sacked by Vikings and the inhabitants retreated to Salisbury, and it is likely that the change of type coincided with this event. However, there are a number of difficulties with reconstructing such a fixed framework. Not all types are as well represented in the surviving material, and it is clear that this is not always simply a result of a few large hoards distorting our view. There are a number of very small and rare types which were certainly never meant to become fully fledged issues, though some bear a clear relationship to them. Examples from the reign of Æthelred II include the Benediction Hand type and the Intermediate Small Cross type, as well as the famous Agnus Dei type: a unique and fascinating issue on which the king’s portrait and the reverse cross are replaced with, respectively, the Lamb of God and the Holy Dove. The exact context for the production of this very rare coinage is unclear (eighteen specimens survive, as of November 2008): it was only struck at smaller mints, mostly in the midlands, either as an abortive main issue or as a special religious coinage for some specific purpose or occasion. Although the dating is unclear, it may be associated with the Eynsham
Eynsham
Eynsham is a village and civil parish about east of Witney in Oxfordshire, England.-History:Eynsham grew up near the historically important ford of Swinford on the River Thames flood plain...
gathering and the Penitential Edict of 1009. But the difficulties with the sexennial theory are not restricted to smaller, rarer types. The Second Hand type of Æthelred, for example, was not much different in appearance from its predecessor, raising the question of how easily people would have told it and the old coinage apart. More importantly, only minuscule numbers of the type survive from more northerly mints such as Lincoln
Lincoln, Lincolnshire
Lincoln is a cathedral city and county town of Lincolnshire, England.The non-metropolitan district of Lincoln has a population of 85,595; the 2001 census gave the entire area of Lincoln a population of 120,779....
and York
York
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...
which, in the rest of the period, were some of the most productive in the kingdom. It is possible that the Second Hand type represents a continuation of the First Hand type, which may have run on rather longer than six years as part of a mechanism that did envisage changes of type, but not necessarily on a strict sexennial basis.
The late Anglo-Saxon coinage is best understood for the period c. 990–c. 1030 thanks to the discovery of many tens of thousands of coins in hoards from Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
. Connections between England and Scandinavia were very close at this time, with raiders, traders, mercenaries and, ultimately, kings regularly crossing the North Sea
North Sea
In the southwest, beyond the Straits of Dover, the North Sea becomes the English Channel connecting to the Atlantic Ocean. In the east, it connects to the Baltic Sea via the Skagerrak and Kattegat, narrow straits that separate Denmark from Norway and Sweden respectively...
. English coins in Scandinavian hoards probably include at least some profit from raiding and the tributary payments referred to as Danegeld
Danegeld
The Danegeld was a tax raised to pay tribute to the Viking raiders to save a land from being ravaged. It was called the geld or gafol in eleventh-century sources; the term Danegeld did not appear until the early twelfth century...
. Payments to Danish troops employed by the English kings continued until 1051, when Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor also known as St. Edward the Confessor , son of Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy, was one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England and is usually regarded as the last king of the House of Wessex, ruling from 1042 to 1066....
dismissed the last of them. English coin finds in Scandinavia become even fewer after this time. However, since large numbers of roughly contemporary Arabic
Dirham
Dirham or dirhem is a unit of currency in several Arab or Berber nations, and formerly the related unit of mass in the Ottoman Empire and Persian states...
and, later, German coins have also been found in Scandinavia, it is probable that the bulk of the English imports came via trade rather than military action.
General
- Dolley, R. H. M., Anglo-Saxon Pennies (London, 1964)
- Grierson, P., and M. A. S. Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, I: the Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries) (Cambridge, 1986)
- Grierson, P., Numismatics (Oxford, 1975)
- Lyon, C. S. S., ‘Historical Problems of Anglo-Saxon Coinage’, British Numismatic Journal 36 (1967), 227–42; 37 (1968), 216–38; 38 (1969), 204–22; and 39 (1970), 193–204
- Lyon, C. S. S., 'Some Problems of Interpreting Anglo-Saxon Coinage', Anglo-Saxon England 5 (1976), 173-224
- Stewart, B. H. I. H., ‘The English and Norman Mints, c. 600–1158’, in A New History of the Royal Mint, ed. C. E. Challis (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 1–82
- Williams, G., Early Anglo-Saxon Coins (Colchester, 2008)
After Rome
- Abdy, R., ‘After Patching: Imported and Recycled Coinage in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Britain’, in Coinage and History in the North Sea World c. 500–1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald, ed. B. Cook and G. Williams (Leiden and Boston, 2006), pp. 75–98
- Guest, P., The Late Roman Gold and Silver Coins from the Hoxne Treasure (London, 2005)
- Kent, J. P. C., ‘From Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England’, in Anglo-Saxon Coins: Studies Presented to F. M. Stenton on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, 17 May 1960, ed. R. H. M. Dolley (London, 1961), pp. 1–22
- King, C., ‘Late Roman Silver Hoards in Britain’, British Numismatic Journal 51 (1981), 5–31
- King, M. D., ‘Roman Coins from Early Anglo-Saxon Contexts’, in Coins and the Archaeologist, ed. J. Casey and R. Reece, 2nd ed. (London, 1988), pp. 224–9
- Moorhead, T. S. N., ‘Roman Bronze Coinage in Sub-Roman and Early Anglo-Saxon England’, in Coinage and History in the North Sea World c. 500–1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald, ed. B. Cook and G. Williams (Leiden and Boston, 2006), pp. 99–109
- Reece, R., The Coinage of Roman Britain (Stroud, 2002)
- White, R. H., Roman and Celtic Objects from Anglo-Saxon Graves, BAR British Series 191 (Oxford, 1988)
Thrymsas
- Abdy, R., and G. Williams, ‘A Catalogue of Hoards and Single-Finds from the British Isles, c. AD 410–675’, in Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. 500 – 1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald, ed. B. Cook and G. Williams (Leiden, 2006), pp. 11–73
- Grierson, P., ‘La fonction sociale de la monnaie en Angleterre aux VIIe – VIIIe siècles’, in Moneta e scambi nell’alto medioevo (Spoleto, 1961), pp. 341–85; repr. in his Dark Age Numismatics (London, 1979), no. XI
- Metcalf, D. M., Thrymsas and Sceattas in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 3 vols. (London, 1993–4), vol. 1
- Stewart, B. H. I. H., 'Anglo-Saxon Gold Coins', in Scripta Nummaria Romana. Essays Presented to Humphrey Sutherland, ed. R. A. Carson and C. M. Kraay (London, 1978), pp. 143–72
- Sutherland, C. H. V., Anglo-Saxon Gold Coinage in the Light of the Crondall Hoard (Oxford, 1948)
- Williams, G., ‘The Circulation and Function of Coinage in Conversion-Period England, c. AD 580–675’, in Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. 500 – 1250: Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald, ed. B. Cook and G. Williams (Leiden, 2006), pp. 145–92
Sceattas
- Abramson, T., Sceattas: an Illustrated Guide (Great Dunham, 2006)
- Gannon, A., The Iconography of Early Anglo-Saxon Coinage (Sixth–Eighth Centuries) (Oxford, 2003)
- Hill, D., and D. M. Metcalf, ed., Sceattas in England and on the Continent: the Seventh Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History (Oxford, 1984)
- Metcalf, D. M., Thrymsas and Sceattas in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 3 vols. (London, 1993–4)
- Metcalf, D. M., ‘Monetary Expansion and Recession: Interpreting the Distribution Patterns of Seventh- and Eighth-Century Coins’, in Coins and the Archaeologist, ed. J. Casey and R. Reece, 2nd ed. (London, 1988), pp. 230–53
- Rigold, S., ‘The Two Primary Series of Sceattas’, British Numismatic Journal 30 (1960–1), 6–53
- Rigold, S., ‘The Principal Series of English Sceattas’, British Numismatic Journal 47 (1977), 21–30
The age of Offa
- Archibald, M., ‘The Coinage of Beonna in the Light of the Middle Harling Hoard’, British Numismatic Journal 55 (1986), 10–54
- Archibald, M., ‘A Sceat of Ethelbert I of East Anglia and Recent Finds of Coins of Beonna’, British Numismatic Journal 65 (1995), 1–19
- Blunt, C. E., ‘The Coinage of Offa’, in Anglo-Saxon Coins: Studies Presented to F. M. Stenton on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, 17 May 1960, ed. R. H. M. Dolley (London, 1961), pp. 39–62
- Chick, D., ‘Towards a Chronology for Offa’s Coinage: an Interim Study’, Yorkshire Numismatist 3 (1997), 47–64
- Chick, D., ed. M. Blackburn and R. Naismith, The Coinage of Offa and His Contemporaries (London, 2007)
- Pirie, E. J. E., Coins of the Kingdom of Northumbria, c. 700–867, in the Yorkshire Collections (Llanfyllin, 1996)
- Stewart, B. H. I. H., ‘The London Mint and the Coinage of Offa’, in Anglo-Saxon Monetary History: Essays in Memory of Michael Dolley, ed. M. A. S. Blackburn (Leicester, 1986), pp. 27–43
The 9th century
- Blackburn, M. A. S., ‘Alfred’s Coinage Reforms in Context’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. T. Reuter (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 199–217
- Blackburn, M. A. S., and D. N. Dumville, ed., Kings, Currency and Alliances: History and Coinage in Southern England in the Ninth Century (Woodbridge, 1998)
- Blunt, C. E., ‘The Coinage of Ecgbeorht, King of Wessex, 802–39’, British Numismatic Journal 28 (1955–7), 467–76
- Blunt, C. E., C. S. S. Lyon and B. H. I. H. Stewart, ‘The Coinage of Southern England, 796–840’, British Numismatic Journal 32 (1963), 1–74
- Lyon, C. S. S., ‘A Reappraisal of the Sceatta and Styca Coinage of Northumbria’, British Numismatic Journal 28 (1955–7), 227–42
- Pagan, H. E., ‘Coinage in the Age of Burgred’, British Numismatic Journal 34 (1965), 11–27
- Pagan, H. E., ‘Northumbrian Numismatic Chronology in the Ninth Century’, British Numismatic Journal 38 (1969), 1–15
- Pagan, H. E., ‘The Bolton Percy Hoard of 1967’, British Numismatic Journal 43 (1973), 1–44
- Pagan, H. E., ‘The Coinage of the East Anglian Kingdom from 825 to 870’, British Numismatic Journal 52 (1982), 41–83
- Pagan, H. E., ‘Coinage in Southern England, 796–874’, in Anglo-Saxon Monetary History: Essays in Memory of Michael Dolley, ed. M. A. S. Blackburn (Leicester, 1986), pp. 45–65
- Metcalf, D. M., ed., Coinage in Ninth-Century Northumbria (Oxford, 1987)
- Dolley, R. H. M., ‘The Chronology of the Coins of Alfred the Great’, in Anglo-Saxon Coins: Studies Presented to F. M. Stenton on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, 17 May 1960, ed. R. H. M. Dolley (London, 1961), pp. 77–95
- Dolley, R. H. M., and K. Skaare, ‘The Coinage of Æthelwulf, King of the West Saxons’, in Anglo-Saxon Coins: Studies Presented to F. M. Stenton on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, 17 May 1960, ed. R. H. M. Dolley (London, 1961), pp. 63–76
Viking coinages
- Blackburn, M. A. S., ‘The Ashdon (Essex) Hoard and the Currency of the Southern Danelaw in the Late Ninth Century’, British Numismatic Journal 59 (1990), 13–38
- Blackburn, M. A. S., ‘Expansion and Control: Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian Minting South of the Humber’, in Vikings and the Danelaw: Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997, ed. J. Graham Campbell (Oxford, 2001), pp. 125–42
- Blackburn, M. A. S., ‘The Coinage of Scandinavian York’, in Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian York, ed. R. Hall et al. (York, 2004), pp. 325–49
- Blunt, C. E., ‘The St Edmund Memorial Coinage’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 31 (1969), 234–53
- Blunt, C. E., and B. H. I. H. Stewart, ‘The Coinage of Regnald I of York and the Bossall Hoard’, Numismatic Chronicle 143 (1983), 146–63
- Dolley, R. H. M., Viking Coins of the Danelaw and Dublin (London, 1965)
- Dolley, R. H. M., ‘The Anglo-Danish and Anglo-Norse Coinages of York’, in Viking-Age York and the North, ed. R. A. Hall, Council for British Archaeology Research Report 27 (London, 1978), pp. 26–31
- Grierson, P., and M. A. S. Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, I: the Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries) (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 316–25
- Lyon, C. S. S., and B. H. I. H. Stewart, ‘The Northumbrian Viking Coinage in the Cuerdale Hoard’, in Anglo-Saxon Coins: Studies Presented to F. M. Stenton on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, 17 May 1960, ed. R. H. M. Dolley (London, 1961), pp. 96–121
The 10th century
- Blunt, C. E., ‘The Coinage of Æthelstan, King of England 924–39’, British Numismatic Journal 42 (1974), 35–160
- Blunt, C. E., B. H. I. H. Stewart and C. S. S. Lyon, Coinage in Tenth-Century England from Edward the Elder to Edgar’s Reform (London, 1989)
- Jonsson, K., ‘The Pre-Reform Coinage of Edgar – the Legacy of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms’, in Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. 500 – 1250. Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald, ed. B. Cook and G. Williams (Leiden, 2006), pp. 325–46
- Lyon, C. S. S., ‘The Coinage of Edward the Elder’, in Edward the Elder, 899–924, ed. N. J. Higham and D. H. Hill (London, 2001), pp. 67–78
- Pagan, H. E., 'The Pre-Reform Coinage of Edgar', in Edgar, King of the English 959-975. New Interpretations, ed. D. Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 192–207
Edgar's reform and the late Anglo-Saxon coinage
- Blackburn, M. A. S., and K. Jonsson, ‘The Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman Element of North European Coin Finds’, in Viking-Age Coinage in the Northern Lands. The Sixth Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, ed. M. A. S. Blackburn and D. M. Metcalf (Oxford, 1981), pp. 147–255
- Brand, J. D., Periodic Change of Type in the Anglo-Saxon and Norman Periods (Rochester, 1984)
- Dolley, R. H. M., The Norman Conquest and the English Coinage (London, 1966)
- Dolley, R. H. M., ‘An Introduction to the Coinage of Æthelred II’, in Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, ed. D. Hill (Oxford, 1978), pp. 115–33
- Dolley, R. H. M., and D. M. Metcalf, ‘The Reform of the English Coinage under Edgar’, in Anglo-Saxon Coins: Studies Presented to F. M. Stenton on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, 17 May 1960, ed. R. H. M. Dolley (London, 1961), pp. 136–68
- Freeman, A., The Moneyer and the Mint in the Reign of Edward the Confessor 1042–66, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1985)
- Hildebrand, B. E., Anglosachsiska mynt i Svenska Kongliga Myntkabinettet funna in Sveriges jord, 2nd ed. (Stockholm, 1881)
- Jonsson, K., The New Era: the Reformation of the Late Anglo-Saxon Coinage (Stockholm, 1986)
- Jonsson, K., Viking-Age Hoards and Late Anglo-Saxon Coins: a Study in Honour of Bror Emil Hildebrand’s Anglosachsiska mynt (Stockholm, 1987)
- Metcalf, D. M., An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Coin Finds, c. 973–1086 (London, 1998)
- Petersson, H. B. A., Anglo-Saxon Currency: King Edgar’s Reform to the Norman Conquest (Lund, 1969)
- Smart, V., ‘Scandinavians, Celts and Germans in Anglo-Saxon England: the Evidence of Moneyers’ Names’, in Anglo-Saxon Monetary History: Essays in Memory of Michael Dolley, ed. M. A. S. Blackburn (Leicester, 1986), pp. 171–84
- Stewart, B. H. I. H., ‘Coinage and Recoinage after Edgar’s Reform’, in Studies in Late Anglo-Saxon Coinage in Memory of Bror Emil Hildebrand, ed. K. Jonsson (Stockholm, 1990), pp. 455–85