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.