The Volume of Anglo-Saxon Coinage

Abstract

R D. M. METCALF has reduced his estimate of Offa's coin output from J many millions ... probably something like 40 to between io and 30 million pennies.' Though it has still some way to go before it comes down to my own suggestion of between half a million and one million,2 it is at least a move in the right direction. I could perhaps be persuaded to come up a little. His latest figures for Anglo-Saxon mint output, however, must cause the historian to lift his eyebrows. The application of what he has christened Brown's to the Iona hoard of c. 985 results in a die estimate of 2,346 ? 469, which when combined with an average coin output per die of io,ooo-a figure derived from English mint records of the late Plantagenet period-implies a total coin population of I 9-28 million. For the Chester (I 950) hoard of about the same date (C. 970) the same formulae result in an estimate of 6,252? I ,332 dies and a coin population of 50-70 million, two and a half times as large. Both sets of figures cannot be correct. Nor is this all. The Shaftesbury hoard of a few decades later, when treated in the same fashion, gives a total of about 250 dies for Aethelred's Long Cross coinage. Unfortunately over goo dies are represented in the coins of the same issue in the Stockholm collection alone. Something is clearly very wrong, either with the formula itself, or with its application, or with the magic multiplier of io,ooo. Or perhaps with all three.