Organized by Meredith Cutrer, the CEMBI academic lecture series invites leading scholars to present to the Oxford community on their latest, groundbreaking research.
Oxford’s Centre for Early Medieval Britain and Ireland is comprised of faculty, staff, and students across Oxford. We support and facilitate the research, networking, and collaboration of those at Oxford across the faculties working on any facet of British and Irish studies between AD 400 and 900.
Good afternoon my name is Meredith craer and on behalf of the center for early medieval Britain and Ireland we are very pleased to welcome Professor Rory nasmith from Corpus Christie college at the University of Cambridge he is the author of the wonderful book out last summer making money in the Early Middle
Ages Professor naith you’re very welcome thank you very much indeed maredith and thank you for the invitation I’m very very pleased to be here now the venerable be there he is died on the 26th of May 735 and in the course of his 61 or two years
Of life he would have seen and heard about a lot of important economic changes in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms many of these led to people being able to obtain a wider range of goods at markets above all at the bustling Emporia which were effectively permanent quasi Urban markets situated at a few strategic
Points in the landscape such as ipswitch London Southampton and York as a priest and monk bead might have particularly approved of the surge in Foundation of large churches usually called minsters of which hundreds appeared across England during this time the minsters May well have been major consumers and
Producers and in an agrarian society such as this was that meant they could only flourish on the basis of a healthy farming sector which would mean people growing and rearing more Surplus hints of intensification can be seen here too in excavations of rural settlements and evidence for changes in cultivation last
But not least beid would have probably have been aware that England in his own day was a wash with silver silver pennies had appeared around the time of his birth and become a major fixture of the economic landscape in the decades that followed beid died more or less at
The high point of this phenomenon and had he lived another 10 or 20 years he would have seen a market contraction in the monetary economy so bead’s life thus encompasses a remarkable set of economic changes and there is Broad consensus among archaeologists and historians that England in the long 8 Century which
Really means the late 7th to the early 9th centuries was a relatively wealthy Dynamic place with minsters and their products like manuscripts and stone buildings as the most Vivid articulate survivals of the age but there is less confidence about how and why this transformation came about especially in
Its early stages around the time of beid and what this talk was consider is how and why these changes began when they did now the monetary system provides a valuable starting point because its growth was both very Swift and very traceable coins were not new in the age
Of bead gold Shillings or traces had been made since about the year 600 in England inspired by contact with those from contemporary Gaul these were very valuable coins and although the number of finds of them has increased in recent decades they remain rare relative to the silver that would come later
They also started to be debased with silver from almost as soon as they began to be made um such that by the middle Decades of the 7th Century the gold content of these in quotation marks gold coins uh was very low down to 10% by weight or less eventually sometime in
The 660s or 670s the penny dropped pun intended and the English decided simply to make silver coinage of what were already known as pennies there are now some 7,000 recorded fines of early silver pennies from England which were made and lost between about 670 and 750 The Humble early medievalist is normally
Put in their place when figures like this are set next to equivalents from the Roman period or the later Middle Ages but in this instance the comparison is not quite so chastening if one thinks only of gold and silver coins the age of the early pennies Compares pretty well
In fact these decades saw more silver coins being used and lost than any other equivalent period between about 400 and 1200 one can only wonder how many coins there were in circulation originally at the first point when it is possible to get some idea of this which is when
Minting records first appear in England in the decades around 1300 each known find of a coin stands for at least 10,000 others that were not lost possibly a lot more than 10,000 7th Century coins were broadly similar in weight and metal but smaller in size each one weighing less about a gram um
But they are also small and chunky usually less than 10 mm in diameter also the buying power of s Century coins was significantly greater so if anything I suspect the number being lost may actually have been even smaller in relative terms than in the 13th and 14th centuries no certainty is no certainty
Is possible but it is worth stressing that this probably was a relatively Rich monetary economy with tens of thousands of pennies made for each one that survives now these are sobering figures but there is also no consensus on how the coins should be interpreted the vast majority of early pennies carry no
Inscription so who issued them is unclear and when and where they were made can only be determined in general terms this if I can turn my page um this was also a very complex coinage with hundreds of significant varieties that circulated together lots of agencies seem to have been involved the best
Guess based on the few inscribed issues and cautious interpretation of iconography and distribution suggests that some were produced under the patronage of minst and some under that of Kings but the very granular nature of circulation does not Point towards major Kings and kingdoms taking a large role in the currency this seems effectively
To have been a monetary freefor all a world in which issuing coins and specifically one’s own coins for one’s own purposes became a desirable thing for figures and institutions with wealth this raises another set of long standing puzzles on where these pennies came from there must have been a lot of
Silver available to sustain the burst of monetization seen in the late 7th and early 8th centuries the source of the silver has long been unclear various ideas were floated over the years most of them modeled on explanations um that were the more prevalent for the later Middle Ages um
And these favored exogenous factors um that is to say uh things like a new mine coming online something that suddenly injected a new supply of silver um the mind that people tended to fast on was male in Western France or perhaps there was an unknown one somewhere in Germany
I and various other people got so fed up with being asked this question about where did the silver come from that we decided to find a more confident answer and fate dealt us a good hand here because I had some Project funding from the ahrc that was meant to pay for a
Conference in January 2022 but then the Omicron variant of covid arrived in November and December 2021 and the event had to shift on online meaning that it was more or less free and so when the possibility of investigating the sources of silver came up in discussion there was money available to do something
Crucially there were also people with the requisite skills specifically Jane Kershaw and Steven Merkel who were in the midst of a project looking at uh precisely this sort of question with reference to Viking Sila in the 9th century the final piece of the puzzle was the Fitz William Museum in Cambridge
Which kindly agreed to let us work on their coins and they’ve got a phenomenal phenomenally Rich broad collection of early medieval stuff and all of this meant that we could sample a very broad selection of coins without having to go round multiple collections in the event
We analyzed 50 coins you can see us doing it here um in Cambridge um Jane has seen this picture a number of times and I think is a huge fan of it um uh so we analyzed our 50 coins and we got two kinds of data from from doing so
Detailed information about their Elemental composition uh which is important because Trace elements are sometimes diagnostic of metal Origins and also information about the isotopic makeup of the lead that these silver coins contained which again is useful because this can tell you something in very delicate terms about the origin of
The metal because most silver that was being used at least in Europe in the Mediterranean at this time was derived from lead or now the results of this uh laser ablation analysis were very surprising they showed us that there was a high degree of homogeneity in the
Sample that we analyzed which for the late 7th and uh sorry for the late 7th Century meant coins from England frisia and Northeast frania those are not distinguishable they’re using very much the same silver but the silver that was used in this Northwest European region was not from any known local mine in
Particular it did not match the characteristics of male in Western France which is the main known source of fresh Boolean in marav Indian and Carol Indian Europe it also did not match late Roman silver of the kind found at hawen um Traer law or The escaline Horde and
Which was recycled in pictland into the 7th Century the metal of the early pennies was however a compelling match for lead and silver objects from the early medieval Eastern Mediterranean the Byzantine Empire it is very similar for example to these things the collection of bantine silver vessels and spoons
Deposited in Satan who these weighed at least 10 kilos so would have made a approximately 10,000 pennies if melted down there was a lot more work needed to flesh out how this connection works it might be possible to narrow down the major sources within the bantine Empire analysis of other objects um besides
Coins from across Western Europe might give a better idea of when this stock of silver appeared and how widely it was used um at the moment no firm answers can be given though clearly there is a good project to be pursued here what can be said though is that this supply of
Eastern silver was very probably not arriving fresh in the 670s and after the Sutton who treasure was deposited at least a generation before the sudden and strong pivot towards silver coinage began by that time the once Rich bantine production of silver coin and plate was in fast decline moreover the late sth
And early 8th centuries were a low point in terms of East West Trade across the Mediterranean this is important with reference to Northern Europe because it suggests that the large stock of silver behind the coins was there already in other forms something changed to make it more desirable to have coins rather than
Silver plates now two myths need to be laid to rest before proceeding with what did lie behind the silver boo of the late 7th Century first adopting silver was not just a matter of running out of gold and switching to the next best option embracing silver represented a real and
Significant break with earlier practice a conscious decision to do things differently indeed in some ways it was not that much of a break at all silver was the principal metal used in the debasement of gold earlier in the gold coins earlier in the 7th century and silver objects such as broches were
Common place in England and frisia and frania in and before the 7th Century not least as the dominant element in the latest portion of the Stafford even so gold stocks probably were straightened by the mid sth century um since the time of HRI piren um the collapse of gold supplies in the west
Has been tied to strains in East West Exchange and while the basic point is probably right Warfare was not the only reason and explanations for it are no longer or at least not only sort in the military conquests of the early cffs constricted supplies also reflect new policies inside the Byzantine Empire
Where the exigencies of the worsening military situation and fiscal retrenchment curtailed the outflow of gold concentrating what there was on internal needs the response to this situation varied regionally in the kingdoms of visigothic Iberia and Lombard ity increas increasingly debased gold coin persisted for centuries again
It needs to be emphasized that the move towards silver coin in northern Europe especially on the scale seen in England was by no means natural or inevitable the second uh myth is that the move to Silver did not Mark the creation of a mass Market currency data
On prices from the late 7th and early 8th centuries are effectively non-existent but a Denarius of comparable weight and finess in frankia in the 790s could buy 122 loaves of high quality wheat bread it was an appreciable sum at the same time a penny was significantly less valuable than
Earlier gold coins the buying power of coins did not depend exactly on the amount of precious metal they contained but the widespread equivalence of gold to Silver in later times was 1 to 10 or 12 the silver pennies seem then to have been aimed at a middling economic level
They represented an amount that was still substantial but accessible enough that most people in society would probably have used them at least some times as a result the use of coin broadened in a way it had not done since the late room period the placement of pennies engraves in the southeast of 7th
Century England suggests that access to coins played a significant part in constructing social identity as argued by John N and Chris skull they were more numerous than earlier deposits of gold coins and burials and moreover were not pierced or mounted um as a high proportion of earlier examples from
Graves had been the silver pennies may have been included as a metonym for the economic agency brought by monetization along the lines of what goog siml argued for much later times the value of coined money was encoded in much more than a piece of stamped metal deep hierarchical historical and religious associations
Adhered two coins from the context of their manufacturer and initial distribution and were also reflected in the extensive range of iconography seen at this time these symbolic resonances helped rather than hindered circulation for they played a major part in legitimizing a neutral form of exchange anchoring coinage to forces and
Traditions that transcended individual relationships put simply the onset of the early pennies hints not just at a lot more coins around but at a society where coined money carried new broadened social meaning one in which money had begun to speak more loudly than it had in centuries again though we run up
Against the question of why it arose so quickly especially if it is not possible to invoke the usual explanation of a new mine just coming online something must have changed closer to home and it may well have been something to do with how demand was configured on a demographic
Level when beid looked back over his great survey of 7th Century England the ecclesiastical history of the English people um he drew up a timeline of key events in each year and in the year 664 um one thing he picked out in Stark terms was and the plague came at
Pestilencia vet uh this marks the beginning of Britain’s final bout of late antique Bubonic plague the disease that had Afflicted large parts of Europe Asia and Africa since the mid sixth Century the last experience with plague in Britain apparently lasted on and off until 687 its impact is largely known from the
Pages of historical narratives by bead adamnan of Iona and other ecclesiastics John madut has expertly assembled and assessed their testimony a priest called tii was said in the earliest life of St cber to remembered the mortality that depopulated many places and bead observed that it laid low a vast number
Of people and caused wide spread Havoc both in Britain and in Ireland several monasteries were decimated I got this nice picture somewhere at home I’ve got a children’s book from 1980s all about bead and Abbott chafi which has a lovely drawing of all these monks dying of
Plague in we mouth jarrow but alas I I couldn’t find it so we’re stop with this um at bead’s jarro all of those who could read preach or say the antons and responses were snatched away by plague saved the Abbot himself and a lad who had been brought up and educated by him
And there is a good chance that the lad in the story was bead himself For Whom the plague would have been a direct and painful memory if bead and his contemporaries are taken at their word the 7th Century plague devastated Britain the difficulty is that its consequences cannot be reliably traced
Beyond the pages of these literary texts no other documents report the occurrence or effects of plague nor are there any obvious archaeological vestages this visitation of the plague did not leave a trail of mass Graves or any burials in which remains of the Yia pistus genome
Have yet been found that said there are only four Mass Graves known from England even for the period of the black death in the 14th century and there is enough other evidence to leave no doubt of its impact nor is it inherently unlikely that a visitation of plague would have
Cut a sue through the 7th Century population even allowing for its smaller size and dispersed overwhelmingly rural character this was no defense for some similar regions in the 14th century a point recently highlighted by Ola benedicto the absolute size of the population of 7 Century England and the
Extent of its possible decline are a matter of guesswork from a demographic point of view the Early Middle Ages are a void that gapes between the very tentative estimates of the Romano British population of maybe 2 million at its height and those arrived on a a slightly but still still tentative basis
From Doomsday Book in 1086 which puts the population then at a little over 2 million and the question is what happened in between it is presumed broadly in line with the rest of Western Europe that a late and post Roman phase of population decline turned around and
Began to rise in the sth century or the eth which would be compatible with the story of terrible plague coming in waves in the sixth and seventh centuries plague has long been acknowledged as a factor in pushing an already depressed or static population even lower perhaps
To its medieval low point but it may also have helped to put in place the conditions for change in the years that came after as in the later Middle Ages it may well taken a long time for the population in England to recover from the plague if the 7th Century plague did
Cause significant mortality across Society its consequences could have helped precipitate the economic changes seen in the later 7th Century the foundation of minsters the growth of Emporia and Rapid monetization in silver it was to be sure not the only Factor at work but it was a sudden and severe
Shock with the potential to cause a catalyzing effect in the short term there should be no doubt that its impact was Dire in every respect um but within a few years the survivors May well started to reap what James bellich has called a plague bonus disruption to economic and social
Dynamics led to a redistribution of resources opening the door for some members of society to do very well or at least do things differently patronage of minsters would reflect the deaths of aristocrats and consolidation of land rights into fewer richer hands and some of these survivors may have chosen to
Transfer some of their property to the developing Church before long those ministers would themselves become major fuky of wealth and demand other changes might reflect a disrupted relationship between Aristocrats and choras or free Farmers the bulk of choras could reasonably be described as peasants in formal terms in that they farmed land on
A settled basis primarily for subsistence although the designation of chel was a legalistic and not a not a strictly economic one um and is it therefore embraced a wide variety of people who were neither enslaved nor yith kund or aund which were the usual terms for aristocrats the latter at this
Time probably consisted of Kings those whose families had recently been Kings but lost out in layered intrigues of early Anglo-Saxon politics and then finally those recently elevated by the action of Kings in other words a fairly small very select group um importantly any disruption brought on by plague
Would not for the most part have played out through tenurial obligations 7th Century Aristocrats probably only had light Powers over most chal tenants in a landscape of sprawling Estates the main burden that cholas owed to these these sort of landlords consisted of agricultural produce calculated for a
Large area and so only a very small amount per individual household theor is the name given to a later manifestation of this tribute especially in Wessex what which in at least some cases took the form of a feast where the food render would be consumed by Lords and
Tenants together there is no indication that these renders grew During the period of the early pennies nor is there any sign of rents in cash Mass mortality among the cholas would have had a similar effect as it did among the aristocracy concentration of land and resources into fewer hands
Albeit on a smaller scale individually even if collectively there were way more of them it would follow from this that at least some of the choras became wealthier and had more more potential to invest in cash crops consuming more but also profiting from the consumption of others they could even in structural
Terms have become Elite in that they no longer participated in direct cultivation of the land though this may never have been recognized in legalistic terms or only much later potentially after several generations of economic success the material results of prosperity at this level are perhaps visible at individual farmsteads like
Pennyland in buckinghamshire ryby Crossroads in Lincolnshire and Branford in suffk where evidence has been found of agricultural specialization and intensification such as the construction of enclosures and of more permanent buildings even more apparent is participation in exchange systems not least fines of coins and of non-local Ceramics Rising wealth in this segment
Of society contributes significantly to explaining several other related phenomena one of these is the intensification of aristocratic land exploitation Elite land exploitation geared towards large scale agricultural output on on a level far beyond what one might expect of an individual CH household yon in Oxfordshire was important in Hay cropping while Wick and
Bond hunt in Essex and high and feros in northamptonshire concentrated on the rearing and corralling of livestock who were they producing this magnified Surplus for a second issue is the growth of Emporia from the 670s in a manner that strongly suggests Royal intervention direct settlement expansion is clearest at London where new phases
Of growth actually overlay the semi of a previous generation um and burials with high status and imported goods have also been found at ipswitch in Southampton suggesting a growing concentration of wealth explanations for intensified production and distribution have always suffered from lacking any other interested party it was not clear
Where the produce or worked goods were actually going but if a significant number of cholas now had more Goods to bring to Market and more money to spend in those markets as consumers the circle comes closer to completion with the silver coin AG being what held it together a burgeoning market of richer
Choras offered aristocrats the possibility of increasing their wealth using land and the market but without the prospect of raising dues on most inhabitants of that land and coins helped bridge the gap between the two holders of Boolean meaning Elites Aristocrats would suddenly have had an incentive to switch to a more granular
Way of using that silver as they minted coins to strengthen their position in a market that was rapidly recovering and taking on a new more complex form than here for most of the products that changed hands in this scenario would have been grown raised or made in England they
Would have been attractive both for production and consumption to aristocratic and cheral households who simply wanted more and better food to eat some food stuffs would have gone to feed the population of Emporia partly by commercial roots and partly by redistribution within larger Elite Property networks but there were also
Goods that moved across seas and over long distances coin silver was one of them and although there was a large reserve of Boolean in England already in the mid 7th Century it was constantly being supplemented from frisia which in turn was probably into obtaining its silver from frankia and more than 20% of
All early pennies found in England belong to types usually attributed to frisia these undoubtedly show strong trading links but they may not have been the main source of bullan as there was clearly no General requirement to melt them down another major input could have been wine as suggested by France thus um
While wool might have already been a significant export certain Woolen items such as rugs and capes were a desirable export from Britain already in the Roman period and the laws of Ena um which date to 688 by by 7694 possibly with later additions uh these refers to the payment of what was
Called a gavel qu a blanket being paid as rent um one of those per hide was owed to the Lord Charlamagne and his famous ler to offer from 79 6 refers to an unwelcome recent adjustment in the length of cloaks which were being exported from England to frania at that
Time and the particular form of anglo-saxon market system postulated here with a prominent role for richer choras would dovetail well with the form of the wool market as it emerged in the Central and later Middle Ages with sub Elite Farmers being collectively the largest producers by far James mhall has
Con has calculated that autonomous peasant producers collectively accounted for over 80% um of wool production in the 14th and 15th centuries there had of course been centuries of capillary commercialization by this point but the underlying pattern is likely to be instructive most of the 7th Century population were cholas with their own
Land and strong rights over what that land produced so they were in a position to reap considerable rewards from turning to Sheep and Wool um as the bioarchaeological record suggests was happening widely at this time and doing other things as well now one question that may be running through some heads
At this point is whether the early pennies do indeed represent a commercial economy and if so where that Commerce took place minting at this point was apparently not State LED um and instead depended on the direct needs of patrons usually among the elite their needs indirectly supported the subsequent uses
Of those coins as they passed from one recipient to another and the large dispersed distribution of early pennies strongly suggests that these that there that there were many steps in their circulation this was one of the strengths of coined money it facilitated economic interaction between groups and individuals with weaker pre-existing
Social ties in other words coins Point towards a relatively complex exchange system and it is likely that this had a largely commercial basis law codes and narrative anecdotes make it clear that buying and selling was common place in England in the 7th Century some of that Commerce took place in designated Market
Sites like the Emporia but laws also allow for Traders going out among the people as they call it OA on fulker um to DOS business and the only requirement was that they carry out transactions before Witnesses the lack of formerly designated markets in early medieval England at this time is therefore a red
Herring any settlement or gathering of people such as an assembly could in theory have served as a venue for trade um but in the absence of formal markets or larg state structures concentrations of demand um would surely have been the largest draw Elite networks and centers therefore provided a basis for the
Commercial distribution of goods and by extens of coins hot spots of coin circulation sometimes called productive sites where dozens or even hundreds of coins have been found in close proximity include several locations that are known or thought to have been secular or ecclesiastical Elite sites renam uh near
Suen who in suffk now provides the textbook case having provide produced hundreds of single fins of early pennies and even a fair few early gold coins too this is not to say that all use of early medieval coin was commercial Philip grion long long ago argued compellingly
That they were also used in gift giving but many of his strongest reasons for for saying that such as the scarcity of fines in the 1950s no longer apply and there are no longer any grounds for thinking that gifts accounted for a large proportion of monetized exchange the same goes for fines and
Compensations while money rents are unlikely to have been common in England at this time as will be seen moreover even when gifts were made with coin it was often with the expectation of commercial contacts with their subsequent dispersal different kinds of use were therefore closely intertwined with a solid commercial
Foundation another valid question is how the Nexus of Amplified commercial activity and monetization fitted in with the rest of the economy was this representative of the whole probably not we are talking about a relatively small slice of both the population and of economic activity many probably most people um would not have profited
Meaningfully from the changes wrought by the plague there were probably quite a lot of slaves in 7th Century England surely more for example than the 10% or so of the population um that were still enslaved in the Doomsday survey in the 11th century and those slaves would have
Seen little or no tangible benefit and if anything they may have worked harder as Aristocrats and some cholas sought to extract more from the soil with less labor available one effect of this larger slave component would have been to constrain the the factor market the labor market um for agricultural work
Which is an important contrast to the effect of the black death in the 14th century when this is something that changes quite significantly another constituency whose position materially changed would have been the choras who accepted a closer and more direct form of tency from a larger landholder and
Found themselves living and working on Inland the term generally used for a smaller core portion of an estate exploited for the direct benefit of the landholder rather than being Ved out in effect this was how large landholders respond responded to the constraints on their ability to extract more resources
From tenants if that even is the best word for the relationship between them Inland territories were probably an innovation of the late 7th and early 8th centuries and not yet numerous um though they may well account for some of the large sites of specialized intensified production named above such places
Needed a large amount of work much of which could have been performed by enslaved individuals though not all in a post-plague climate of reduced population negotiation with your lass over service on other people’s property seems to have become a sticking point that is the implication of a much
Debated passage in the Lords of King Ena and Clause 67 which concerns tenants who must perform Labor Service if the Lord gives them housing while another passage um Clause 63 spells out that only certain classes specialized classes of slave could be transplanted by an aristocrat from one estate to another
Suggesting that some Lords had been moving a much larger number of slaves all of this points to challenging circumstances for landholders who had extensive property and wanted to exploit it more intensively but needed to work harder to find an adequate Workforce these laws probably related first and foremost to Elites though upand coming
Choras may also have encountered some of the same pressures on a smaller scale as they set themselves apart from Neighbors a gradually recovering population the decades after the plague would have helped fulfill this demand now from about 740 the early pennies were fewer and More debased in most of Eastern England with the
Conspicuous exception of East Anglia and North Umbria they had effectively gone by the 750s and even in East Anglia there there aren’t that many of them this was an inevitable outcome of the dynamic that brought the silver pennies into being the stock of originally Byzantine silver that had served the
English so well was simply depleted prolonging the Vitality of the currency as long as possible probably had a stimulating effect on the economy Nick Mayu has argued that in contrast England’s staunch refusal to debase its currency in the 14th and 15th centuries helped keep cash scarce and prices uh
Stagnant and by extension contributed to the country’s very slow demographic recovery from the Black Death in the mid 8th Century coins could have been remined perhaps several times and supplemented to some extent with silver from frisia but set against a continually soaring output and Decades of attrition through circulation it was
Only a matter of time before the silver penny coinage collapsed Aristocrats could no longer count on a ready supply of Boolean or on as steady and fluid a market sector tighter money meant more wary use of other resources and it was at this time that patronage of minsters also
Dried up and even went into reverse clergy at the Council of closo in 747 lamented how kings Aristocrats and even as they put it very many of lower status minoris potis plamy envied and coveted the material wealth of English churches the challenges of the mid 8th Century should not be magnified too much
English Elites did not abandon the market-based policies of earlier times and the Emporia um and IP switch wear Pottery remained important into the late 8th and early 9th centuries but their interaction um with that market seems to have shifted in addition to preying on minsters and their property aristocratic
Landholders can be seen imposing cash rents on Rural tenants for the first time time which implies a different kind of exploitation of land one that was founded on strengthening authority over tenants perhaps especially over servile tenants who owed obligations to Inland territories rather than the mass of cholas um but a strengthening position
All the same nor did coinage completely end in England in the mid 8th Century in North Umbria and East Anglia local Kings led the way in establishing new forms of silver currency that regularly carry the name of the ruler something almost unheard of in the time of the early
Pennies and before long they would be joined by offer of Mercier um who ruled between 757 and 796 out of scarcity and possibly shaken confidence in coined money a new model was emerging of coinage under direct Royal patronage by office time a new pattern was also emerging in the supply
Of silver dominated by Frankish sources Prime among which was now the mining complex of Mel in Western France all of these new issues however were limited in size compared to earlier times southern England was without a substantial coinage until about the 780s the currency underwent a limited Revival
Around that time though it still got nowhere near the volume of circulation in the decades around 700 and it also hinged on a closer and perhaps shorter term cycle of trade with the carolingian Empire if movements of wool and wine had started to be important in the late 7th
Century they may well now have been the main Force bringing silver into England with less of a local Reserve ve to rely on the end of the early pennies contributes to the general impression that they were part of what John Blair has called a spectacular but transient boom and comparison with England’s main
Neighbors in northern Europe shows that both the peak and the trough of the early pennies were unusually extreme in frankia where the coinage was reformed along Royal Lines by pip in the thir and the 750s at about the same time as in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms the late maravian silver dinari are ult to
Evaluate but did not Peter out in the same way as their English equivalents and nor was the new Royal coinage instituted by Pippin as scarce as its counterparts in the early years of offers Reign frisia and Reba in utland maintained coinages of the same general format as the early pennies into the
Late 8th century and possibly the 9th century with no apparent drop off until much later than in England silver was therefore still available for minting in other parts of mid 8th century Europe but the monetary Dynamics in England had diminished its capacity to make more coins on the old model in simple terms
English Aristocrats Aristocrats had liquidated their reserves of silver too far and too fast without an adequate Supply from overseas to make up for them and in the new regime access to new coin was a lot narrower the breadth and reach of the monetary economy in the late 7th
And early 8th centuries had indeed been exceptional it is important to reiterate that the direct evidence for the impact of the plague of 664 to 687 is entirely literal the level of mortality had caused and other important details of the immediate aftermath such as effects on prices are
Unknown um and short of dramatic new evidence coming to light which I would love but very much doubt um likely to remain unknown for the foreseeable future the cumulative unknown quantities are daunting one could draw the conclusion that the plague was a figment of anxious rhetoric informed by reading
Of the Bible and late antique literature or else that it was so much brillian foam swept along on the tides of History leaving giv no long-term effect but to adopt this view is to take absence of evidence as evidence of absence that is a risky proposition in general terms for
A period as poorly documented as the 7th Century yet it also risks discounting what can be seen in other periods to be an important Force for change there is no inherent reason to doubt that 7th Century England was subject to the same general kinds of plague driven disruption that have been traced so
Effectively for 14th century England or albe it’s on a very different basis the 6th Century Mediterranean though that is not to say that one should expect the same consequences as in those other cases the aim here has been to review with an open mind how the plague might have affected the several
Economic changes of the latest 7th Century it probably Amplified and hastened these processes rather than starting them already in the decades around 600 the English Emporia were beginning to take shape princely burials like suen who and prittlewell demonstrate impressive wealth and long-distance connections not least in silver and some minsters and Elite
Centers as now visible at liming in Kent were taking on Monumental proportions there was also a more modest increase in the volume and distribution of gold coin in the early 7th Century plague and the death and disruption that it caused could would have been a horrific thing
To go through but the argument here has been that the overall sorry that the surviv overall the survivors in the late sth and early 8th centuries found themselves living with some significant benefits as a result it was at precisely the time the plague hited him Poria minst and monetization began to ramp up
Dramatically the idea of a plague bonus is new or at least newly recognized in the post- Roman world but is well established in relation to England in the 14th century where the plague led to a significant increase in GDP per capita for even though overall output declined the population fell even further
Proportionally in the long run this led to significant Improvement in the material well-being of many non- Elites though that only came after several more complex stages in the immediate aftermath of the plague and there was also a significant degree of friction in dealing with Lords and Royal authorities in 7th Century England the
Plague led to an injection of resources and energy into the commercial side of the economy Canter intuitively this was because other potential areas for Change and exploitation were comparatively underdeveloped England in the age of bead and the 7th Century plague was an example of what Chris Wickam has called
The Peasant mode meaning that landholders had limited saurial rights over proprietor cultivate in contrast to the feudal mode where they did nor was there a significant market for wage labor as there would be in the 14th century Aristocrats and choras then who were in a position to benefit from the PO post plague
Conditions had nowhere else to go now coin played a big part in this story Mark block once described money as like a seismograph that not only detects but sometimes also causes larger Tremors in the case of 7th Century England coins argue did both their significance needs
To be read on two levels if more coins were being made that probably says something about power relations as articulated through movable wealth which is undoubtedly an economic matter though it is not only or simply governed by economic forces However if those coins went down significantly in value and
Circulated widely and in articulated way that says something quite different that there was a well-developed middle level of Exchange in which in which Elites and non- Elites could participate coins were of course used for lots of things but the Baseline assumption should be that local commercial exchange was the
Largest single category and the one that most helped pivot coins between other uses on the face of it then large numbers of coins of the kind scene in 7th Century England should stand for a burgeoning market system and for the growing ability of more of the population to participate in and profit
From it the model of monetization at this time was thus quite different from that of the Central and later Middle Ages the latter is essentially a matter of Supply the currency being fed richly or starved in accordance with the flow of Boolean which primarily depended on the vagaries of silver mining Supply
Also mattered in the Early Middle Ages gold and silver had to come had to be acquired from somewhere but it is increasingly recognized on the basis of metallurgical evidence um that that there were large and enduring pools of Boolean that circulated continuously at this time periodic injections of silver
From fresh mines were not the whole story and Boolean not only moved but changed form given the relatively marginal form of monetization prevailing in early medieval western Europe a larger role might be assigned to demand than to supply the wish of those with access to Silver meaning Elites in the
First instance to use coin had a powerful effect on the economy more widely if blocks numismatic seism graph did stay in direct proportion to economic complexity more generally then beaden England would have been significantly ahead of frankia in the 7eventh to 9th centuries or even 11th and 12th century England that is simply
Not credible um based on other criteria derived from Ceramics documentation and settlement archaeology both were significantly more economically complex than 7th Century England but it raises the important and difficult question of what coins do show even in the augmented quantity seen around 700 they would have factored into only a minority of
Exchanges and the size of that Minority could expand and contract rapidly in one sense this was a highly responsive area of economic activity it reflected complexity in a narrow slice of the economy flourishing when Elite interests intersected with those of non- Elites and a granular neutral means of exchange
That eased interaction between the two in another respect the monetary economy was also highly fragile for precisely the same reasons it depended on continued availability of Boolean as well as continued input of wealthy patrons hoarding by Elites could derail the whole operation it follows that early medieval societies could welcome
And absorb coin money when it was available but also do without when necessary block seismograph thus offers a clear yet only partial reading coins in this case cannot be used as a direct measure of overall economic activity the English kingdoms did not then experience a Great Leap Forward in
The late 7th Century or at least not one that lasted hardly any direct long-term Legacy can be identified from the early pennies Mass use of coin simply did not embed itself into the rural economy and it might be argued that this is no surprise the dynamic of production and
Consumption among Elites and peasants or non- Elites perhaps better in northern Europe did not shift on a permanent systematic basis until at least the 12th century at which time sub Elites demand became large and complex enough to take on a more dominant role in the economy some allowance can however be made for
Oscillation in trajectories of economic development during the earlier period the era of the early pennies and Associated phenomena might be read in the this light for a time a segment of the Anglo-Saxon farming population was empowered to consume and produce more with coinage and exchange systems ramping up quickly to support this Nexus
This is an example of how regions sometimes Veer towards or away from greater exchange complexity in the short to midterm external shocks such as plague or extreme climatic events even peace dividends when violence diminished could exacerbate those Tendencies by shaking up the distribution of land and other resources living through these
Times but these temp these temporary shifts on their own did not transform the core infrastructure of the economy for good or ill they built on a background of endogenous local development which in England can be traced back to the early years of the 7th century and that picked up steam
Gradually for a series of reasons of which the plague was only onek you