The circulation of coinage

Abstract

The scale of minting in southern England in the eighth and ninth centuries prompts a number of questions, above all what became of these pennies after leaving the mint. It is at this point that numismatics gives way to monetary history. England’s plentiful find-data allow this to be pursued in great detail, on the basis of the material recorded for several decades in the pages of Coin Hoards and the Coin Register, and latterly in the electronic Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds and Portable Antiquities Scheme. Making the most of this information depends on the contributions different types of coin-find have to offer. Hoards of multiple coins, on the one hand, represent agglomerations of currency hidden or lost, and not recovered until modern times. They might be the savings of an individual or community put together painstakingly over many years, including a wide array of coins added at different times; alternatively, they might have been drawn en bloc from the circulating currency, with or without prejudice in favour of coins of specific design or weight. Dangerous times – war, civil and political unrest, plague and similar – could have a significant effect on the rate at which coins were deposited and not recovered. Both savings and currency hoards are a fundamental source for determining the chronology of a coinage, and also give some insight into which issues were acceptable in use at a specific place and time.