Medieval Coins

 Medieval people used coins, as had the Romans before them, and a surprising number of such old coins still survive.  Where do they come from? you ask.  Well, a lot of numismatists (those who study coins) and archaeologists (those who study the material objects left by former peoples) would like to know, but the coin market is pretty much a Wild West.

Some coins come from hoards.  That is, at a certain point in the past someone took a lot of coins and hid them, probably digging a hole and burying them, planning to come back "soon."  But they never did, and the coins remained hidden over the centuries.  Coin hoards are very interesting to an archaeologist, because coins can generally be dated (at least roughly), and if one is digging up the foundations of a medieval barn and find a hoard where the newest coins are from the mid twelfth century, then one knows the barn was around then or not much later.

The image above is of a hoard found in Scotland.  It's all Roman coins, doubtless from a paymaster who was getting ready to pay his legionnaires but somehow didn't.  The coins are silver, about the size of a quarter.  This hoard was taken to a museum, as such finds should be.  But unfortunately a whole lot of hoards are broken up, sold one by one, with little or no indication of where they came from.  Such coins without a "provenance" as it's called (information on where it's been since created) can be bought surprisingly inexpensively.

The image below is of a twelfth-century Burgundian coin, given to me as a gift by someone who knew I worked on twelfth-century Burgundy.  It's a silver penny and about the size of a dime or a little smaller.

Silver was the standard for coins of value in the Middle Ages.  The Romans had had gold coins, used to buy more expensive objects, but gold coins were rarely minted in the Middle Ages.  A great deal of ordinary business was transacted with bronze coins, worth less than a silver penny.  Interestingly, the former Vikings of Iceland ran short of coins in the twelfth century, once they stopped raiding, when their only source of such money was Norway buying wool from them (and demanding the money back to pay for timber and other things that Iceland lacked).  So they started using lengths of wool cloth as currency, the Althing (their governing body) declaring each year how much a length was worth in silver pennies.  Sort of like writing a check, but bulkier.

Being in charge of a mint in medieval Europe was a sign of power and status.  A lot of counts had their own mints (my little silver penny was minted under the authority of the count of Nevers).  Kings especially minted larger denomination coins and were proud to put their own image on them, as in this coin of Charlemagne's, where he is portrayed as a Roman emperor.

 Medieval rulers would routinely try to reduce the real value of their coins without reducing the nominal value.  So a silver penny might be made a tiny bit thinner, or the silver might be mixed with tin or bronze, just a tiny bit.  (Then a tiny bit more when the coins were melted down to make new ones.)  This was especially appealing if they had agreed to pay workers more.  ("See, 12 silver pennies, just like I promised.  What do you mean they look kind of funky.")

The Wild West aspect of collecting medieval coins is heightened by the fact that a coin is intrinsically valuable, for the silver (even if alloyed) and for the historical rarity.  So people with collections sell coins if they need (modern) cash.  And why bother verifying the provenance?  Or the grandkids may find a small collection in Grandpa's attic and sell them off one at a time.  Coins can travel great distances.

One of the largest collections of Byzantine coins in the US is in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the university.  The Perry-Campbell collection has some 4000 coins that Mr. Campbell collected in the first half of the twentieth century, while living in Istanbul.  He would buy coins from the locals, who'd found them in their house or dug them up or were breaking down an old collection, and he boasted he paid maybe 10 or 15 cents on average for each.  He liked to show his collection to others interested in old coins, and they'd often trade, further obscuring any provenance that might once have existed.  The coins ended up in Nebraska because that's where Mrs. Campbell was from.  They are uncatalogued, though a graduate student (Samuel Skokan) is doing a good job getting them organized.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the medieval economy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.