The Prosperity of North-Western Europe in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries

Abstract

t j-SHE statistics that have presented are rough and ready, but they are sufficient to show that the Anglo-Saxon coinage is to be measured in fives 1 and tens of millions, at a time when the population was less than one million. The implications for economic history, although in detail they are subject to much uncertainty, are in broad terms clear: long before the Conquest, the monetary sector of the economy was of an extent that the ordinary historical sources fail to reveal. This was the submission, essentially a claim to have established a case for certain minimum figures, against which Mr Grierson directs his criticisms. He reaches the conclusion that certainly at earlier periods, before the needs of Danegeld were felt, and particularly at those times when the use of coined money was restricted to a quite small area of the country, the volume of the coinage have much less.' The debate is thus moved back in time, to focus on the period before 865. Mr Grierson has recently published very much the same idea in the field of Carolingian studies: Many coins of the mid-9th century... have intended simply for payments to the Vikings and were buried before seeing any commercial use at all. Carolingian coins seem to have circulated surprisingly little; their use in commerce was in fact of a marginal character.2 In each case, must have been ?-in fact? These two statements are a reassertion of a point of view to which he gave fuller expression ten years ago, in his Ford Lectures at Oxford in I957. The same ideas on social organization, gift-exchange, and barter were expressed in a lecture before the Royal Historical Society in I 959. The Ford Lectures have not published, but parts of their argument were presented as a paper at the Centro Italiano di Studi sull' Alto Medioevo at Spoleto in i960, the text of which was published in i96 I.3 It contains much that is essential for any informed appreciation of the earlier Anglo-Saxon currency, and is marked by great good sense and purpose. Then as now, however, Mr Grierson was prepared to say that in the eighth and ninth centuries the use of coinage as money was hardly known, in England, outside Kent and Middlesex: Although the Vikings struck many coins in England, these survive only from certain large hoards, and it is not known to what extent they were passed from hand to hand as currency. The use of coinage throughout the country did not become general before the tenth century. He does not hesitate,