The Anglo-Saxon silver penny and the blank spots in Anglo-Saxon history

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Read the British press long enough and you’ll start to think every third Briton is out wandering the fields in the hope of digging up ancient metallic goodies. The country’s awash with people waving metal detectors over the earth, and when one or another of them finds a horde, often of coins, it’s news. And why not? We all love a story about some average Joe (and it does tend to be a Joe, not a Josie) finding buried treasure. 

But what happens to the coins after they find their way to a museum? I’ve pretty much assumed they sit in a case so we can look at them and think how thrilled we should be but aren’t. 

Although maybe that’s just me. I can appreciate a helmet or a brooch. Coins, though? I tend to nod off. But for all I know, seeing a pile of coins in a display case sets other people alight. Either way, a team of researchers has been studying Anglo-Saxon coins and they’re doing something more than just looking at them in a display case.

 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia–which wouldn’t have been in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons were traipsing around.

What coins are we talking about?

Silver pennies. Something like 7,000 of them have been found, dating to a 90-year period, 660 to 750 CE. That’s as many as have been found from the rest of the Anglo-Saxon era (the 5th century to 1066 CE)–and I’ll go out on a limb and assume that means as many coins, not specifically pennies. The wording in the sources I’m working from is ambiguous.

The silver penny came into existence to replace a small, gold coin called scillinga, or as the word’s come down to us, schilling. At the time, that would’ve seemed like a big change–if, of course, you were part of the money economy. But this period marks a shift: more and more people were being drawn into the money economy. 

The silver penny remained England’s primary coin until the 14th century. 

 

The research

To study the coins, the researchers looked at trace elements and took microscopic samples so they could analyze their lead isotopes. 

Why bother? Because “lead isotopic ratios may be used in age dating and petrogenetic tracing of igneous, metamorphic, and hydrothermal rocks.”

Did that help?

I didn’t think it would. Basically, analyzing lead isotopes can tell you stuff , but only if you know how to listen. I don’t, so I trotted along behind the experts and listened to them instead.

Here’s what I learned:

First, that they used a new technique involving lasers and very tiny samples of the coins. In other words, they took so little that they got to have their cake and eat only the tiniest sliver of it. 

Second, that although these are silver pennies, they have traces of gold, bismuth, and other elements I know next to nothing about except that they can tell  the researchers where the silver came from, which in turn tells historians who was trading with who and how much.

Third, that the coins weren’t made from recycled Roman silver–either old Roman coins or fancy tableware. The silver was from Byzantium. The study’s lead author, Dr Jane Kershaw, said, “These coins are among the first signs of a resurgence in the northern European economy since the end of the Roman Empire. They show deep international trade connections between what is now France, the Netherlands, and England.” 

But the silver itself would’ve gotten to western Europe decades before the coins were made, because trade and diplomatic contact were at a low point in the late 7th century. They probably spent the intervening years as fancy stuff that impressed the neighbors. 

One of the study’s co-authors speculates that Byzantine silver found its way to England by way of trade, diplomatic payments, and Anglo-Saxon mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army.

According to a co-author, Rory Naismith, “Elites in England and Francia were almost certainly sitting on this silver already. We have very famous examples of this: the silver bowls discovered at Sutton Hoo and the ornate silver objects in the Staffordshire Hoard.”

Sutton Hoo? That’s where an Anglo-Saxon king was buried in an entire ship with a hoard of treasure. If someone had melted down the Sutton Hoo silver, they would’ve had enough silver for 10,000 pennies. 

The Staffordshire Hoard? More of the same but minus the ship. And the burial. It’s “the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever found,” Take a look at the museum’s photos in the link two lines up. It’s beautiful stuff–and no one has a clue why it was buried.

As Kershaw explained, such “beautiful prestige objects would only have been melted down when a king or lord urgently needed lots of cash. Something big would have been happening, a big social change.

“This was quantitative easing, elites were liquidating resources and pouring more and more money into circulation. It would have had a big impact on people’s lives. There would have been more thinking about money and more activity with money involving a far larger portion of society than before.”

In other words, more people were being pulled into an expanding money economy: more money in circulation and more people circulating it.

I’d love to line that up with a quick sketch of some relevant events in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms at the time, but although I can find some irrelevant ones, relevant poses a problem. So little is known about the era. And that’s what makes this way of thinking about the coins important: it hints at ways the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were changing, and if it doesn’t quite fill in the blanks it does at least let us pencil some possibilities into the picture. But we’ll have to learn to live with a lot of blank spaces.

21 thoughts on “The Anglo-Saxon silver penny and the blank spots in Anglo-Saxon history”

  2. Pingback: The Anglo-Saxon silver penny and the blank spots in Anglo-Saxon history – Loquacious Old Me

  4. I’ve read about some of these amazing finds…sounds like the fantasy of every kid who ever dug in the back yard. The only “silver pennies” I know are the ones growing in my late Mom’s flower patch. But this probably explains the name, rather than the steel pennies minted during WWII.

    I’ve been AWOI (absent without Internet) from April 12 until yesterday…Frontier Communications had a major data breach and then our area had a construction crew cut three of the phone company’s cable. I wil have to scan back to catch up with your recent posts.

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    • Ha! Found one of your lost comments in the spam folder. The rest, unfortunately, have turned to pixel-dust, which is not the said as fairy dust and doesn’t allow you to fly.

      I didn’t know about steel pennies–or about the sad tale of your communications disaster. Glad to have you back.

      On the subject of digging in the back yard, we knew someone who claimed to have buried her gold jewelry in the garden and when she went to dig it up couldn’t find it. We never entirely believed her but couldn’t help imagining someone finding it a hundred years later and wondering what the hell it was doing there.

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  8. Mancus (by Offa ?) somehow rises his head in my brain … but that was a gold coin. Interesting that these coins were minted in Western Europe from silver from East-Rome in a low-contact-phase. At lest those already tested. Leaves us just with the question : What to buy ?

    BTW, what is peculiar about living with blank spaces, historical ones ?

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    • There’s probably nothing peculiar about it–we’re rich in historical blank spaces. The frustration of that blank space draws me to it, and I suspect that’s true of a lot of people. We want to know what happened, what life was like then, and we can’t, but that doesn’t stop the wanting.

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      • Curiosity, and the wanting never stops (nie endet das Begehren).

        I always wanted to understand why humans did what they did. History is nothing but human life, human (re~)actions, decisions ; and of course human ideas that themself become “geschichtsmächtig”, have an historical impact.
        In a way it is a gigantic Caleidoscope. The fact that we change ourself does not make it easier, but more understandable.
        The blank spaces are just there, they do not attract me. What we call history is basically the result of a lot of fortuities, time itself decides what comes to us as source – one fucking bomb in 1945 shortly before the end, and “bang” the history of the German Secret Service is gone. One stupid volcano, and another library burnt. MAybe hese blank spaces are just black mirrors (thanks to Arno S. for this formulation).

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        • The idea of history as nothing but human life is what draws me to social history, which embraces the human life aspect of it as opposed to the wars, kings, and dates approach.

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