The Archbishop of York's Mint after the Norman Conquest

Abstract

COINS WERE MINTED in the name of the Archbishop of York from Ecgberht (732/4-66) to Wulfhere (854-900?).1 The archbishops' names disappeared from the coinage after the fall of the kingdom of Northumbria in 867, and no documentary sources refer to any aspect of their minting rights before the Norman Conquest. This article will reconstruct the development of the archbishop's mint and minting rights from the time of the earliest known source, in the reign of William I (1066-87), to the mint's closure in the 1540s. The archbishop did not have an exclusive right to the production of coinage in York, and the history of the archbishop's mint must be seen in the context of the very different development of the royal mint in York. The archiepiscopal and royal mints of York were the subject of a substantial article by the York historian Robert Davies in the 1850s, and in 1908 Caesar Caine published an invaluable book on the archbishop's mint.2 The archiepiscopal and royal mints received further attention from George Benson in 1913 and L. A. Lawrence in 1925, and there have been many publications on the English ecclesiastical mints since the 1960s.3 A new survey of the growing body of documentary evidence is needed, to