Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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The multiplicity of ﬁnds, as hoards (which allows a relative chronology to

be established) and as isolated coins, suggests that the use of sceattas became

widespread almost immediately. Above all, they could be used for small trans-

actions. Starting in the central part of the North Sea basin, the new money

reached the whole of the West between the end of the seventh and the middle

of the eighth centuries. The ﬁrst types of proto-pennies (struck before 700) have

been found mainly in hoards in Kent and Essex. Later ones have turned up in

Frisia and the rest of Europe, and the last ones have been discovered in a notice-

ably extended radius, from Scandinavia to the whole of Gaul, even southern

Gaul. It is true that some mints had been created far from the ﬁrst centres of

production, for example in the lower Loire valley.

Following the example of

their English and Frisian counterparts, the Frankish kings and mints were soon

to abandon gold coin altogether and mint only silver ‘deniers’. Once measures

for the standardisation and conformity of Charlemagne’s coins had been taken

(at the very end of the eighth century) that was the end of gold coin and of

the ancient, Mediterranean monetary standard in almost all of the West, until

the thirteenth century.

The success of this money can be explained by the way in which the new

coins met the needs and reﬂected the economic realities of the time. A fur-

ther explanation is the inﬂuence henceforward exerted over the whole of the

continent by the seafarers and merchants from the north. Their activity, start-

ing from bases which the new wiks and revitalised old cities provided for

them, came to compensate for the slow decline of the southern routes and the

progressive loss of the Mediterranean as an intermediary for trade.

the northern seas and their hinterland

The whirlwind activity which reached the Northern Seas from around 600 had

such an inﬂuence on the whole of the West because, throughout the seventh

and eighth centuries, there was a progressive integration of the coastal area with

its more distant hinterland. This was due, on the one hand, to the attraction

exerted by the coastal area on the social and economic elite of the hinterland,

and, on the other hand, to the progressive penetration of interior markets by

the maritime population.

To begin with, one must mention the fascination that, from earliest

days, the coastal area exerted on the monastic movement, especially that of

Ireland. This latter developed an original form of littoral or insular monasti-

cism, the pure product of the attraction/repulsion dialectic exerted by the sea.

Its rigours (those of solitude, wind and water) encouraged the most heroic forms

Hill and Metcalf (1984). For more detail see also Blackburn, chapter 24 below.

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of asceticism and of mortiﬁcation. A good example is that of the monastery

of Skellig Michael, probably founded in the seventh century, on an isolated

rock in the sea off the coast of Kerry.

Since the Irish monks were followers

of the peregrinatio pro Deo they carried this original conception of monasti-

cism with them, ﬁrst into the Scottish islands (Iona in 563), then into England

(Lindisfarne in 635), and ﬁnally to the continent. This monasticism did its

best to reconcile the contradictory virtues of cenobitism and eremitism, of

asceticism and a social life, in a speciﬁcally marine environment. Even when

Benedictine spirituality had become the dominant force in western monas-

ticism, the attraction of coastal sites remained very strong. The adhesion of

Frankish and Anglo-Saxon elites to this new model of religious life and the

deliberate support of themonarchies, often ownersof thecoastal saltus,resulted,

during the seventh century, in the multiplication of monastic foundations on

off-shore islands, on continental shores, at the end of, or very near to, estuaries,

or even on the low rivers which ﬂowed into them. Among the most famous

were Whitby, Wearmouth, Jarrow and Crossland in England; Noirmoutier,

Fontenelle/St Wandrille, Jumi

eges, Centula/St Riquier, St Bertin and St Pierre

et St Bavon of Ghent on the continent.

Moreover, each time, the foundation

accounts delighted in praising the advantages of a position on waters frequented

by merchant shipping and open to the world, as well as of the isolation neces-

sary to asceticism. This was why these institutions became poles of economic

development, endowed with port infrastructures and a good communications

system with their hinterland. Not only the network of allied families but also

the lands which they had been granted and which would one day become

refuges could all be found there.

It was at this time too that the monarchies of the interior sought to lay

their hands on the wiks whose development, often originally spontaneous, had

escaped them until then, or else kings sought to create new wiks more or less

ex nihilo.

At all events, for the rulers, it was a question of controlling the

navigation routes which the wiks commanded, of supporting and developing

a policy of overseas contact and future expansion, of facilitating the export

of the surpluses of their own estates, and of retaining for themselves part of

the proﬁts generated by the wiks.Wehave glimpses of the kings of Wessex

and of Denmark founding Hamwih and Ribe respectively at the beginning

of the eighth century, or refounding Sliaswich-Haithabu at the beginning of

the ninth century. Yet we can see little of the efforts of the Frankish kings

(particularly in Dagobert’s time), or of the later mayors of the palace, to lay

their hands on the wiks of Quentovic and of Dorestad. These were the maritime

Edwards (1990), pp. 116–20.

Lebecq (1989) and (2000).

Sawyer (1977).

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The Northern Seas (ﬁfth to eighth centuries) 655

outlets of a huge, rich hinterland where they had much ﬁscal and patrimonial

wealth.

Thus, as soon as Frankish rulers had taken full control of them, around the

end of the seventh century, they endowed both Quentovic and Dorestad with

customs and monetary systems. These were entrusted to important ofﬁcials

to whom Charlemagne later granted full authority over all the customs dues

and all the monies under their respective jurisdiction. The areas of jurisdiction

most likely included the whole of the Neustrian shores for Quentovic, and

the whole of the Austrasian and Frisian shores for Dorestad.

Just like the

wic-gerefan (‘provosts of the wik’), mentioned in the laws of Hlothere of Kent

at the end of the seventh century,

the Frankish monarchy had at its disposal

in its ofﬁces in Quentovic and Dorestad ministeriales controlled by a procurator

or praefectus. They were charged not only with ensuring the policing of the

area and the legality of transactions, but also with collecting landing dues

(ripaticum)from passing ships and customs dues (most probably a decima,

going by ninth-century sources) on unloaded goods.

Kings and princes, and with them the magnates of their kingdoms, were

not the only ones to be attracted by this port and shoreline activity. Anxious

to ensure their salvation in the next world, they wanted to let the churches

proﬁt from it too. Thus, from the beginning of the eighth century, Frankish

rulers offered a tenth of all the revenue they drew from trade from the port

of Dorestad to the cathedral of Utrecht. Almost immediately the cathedral

created an important parish and baptismal church on the spot, corresponding

perhaps to the Upkirika, the ‘high church’ mentioned in later sources.

Quentovic there is greater evidence of this, since one can see a number of

religious settlements endowing themselves with a veritable ‘window to the

sea’, open to all sorts of trade. Not only had the great neighbouring abbeys,

such as St Vaast, St Bertin and Centula/St Riquier, acquired riches in the wik

itself, in the form of parcels of land known as mansi or setici,orinthe immediate

localities (as at Tubersent or at Campigneulles), but some more distant abbeys

were also drawn there by royal concessions. For example there was Ferri

eres-

en-G

atinais, to which Charlemagne gave the neighbouring cella of St Josse.

There was Fontenelle/St Wandrille, which, not content to beneﬁt from its own

portus in the lower Seine valley, received several mansi which were in portu

Wiscus,erecting on one of them perhaps the church of St Peter quae vicina

est emporio Quentovico.Inthe ninth century this would become one of the

refuges for monks ﬂeeing Norman aggression. One can therefore understand

Lebecq (1986).

Lebecq (1991).

Trans. Whitelock, English Historical Documents, i,p.395.SeeSawyer (1977).

Lebecq (1983).

Lebecq (1983); Van Es and Hessing (1994).

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656 st

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why at the end of the eighth century the procurator nominated to represent

Charlemagne at Quentovic, to supervise all the customs activity of the area,

and even to negotiate with Anglo-Saxon kings, especially Offa of Mercia, was

a man of the highest status, Geroald, abbot of St Wandrille.

Even a monastery such as St Germain-des-Pr

es, already master of a villa

supra mare (probably Quillebeuf, in the lower Seine valley), received no part of

the actual income from either Quentovic or Dorestad. And so it was careful, in

779 at the latest,

to get exemption from all transport tax there – as well as in

Rouen, Amiens and Maastricht, that is, in all the main ports of northern Gaul

open to maritime trade. Clearly the Parisian monastery wanted to proﬁt from

this privilege. If one accepts the current interpretation

of certain passages in

the polyptych of Irminon, dated around 820, the monastery ordered its men

from Villemeult (in Beauce) and from Combs-la-Ville (in Brie) to undertake

regular transport services as far as Quentovic.

One can easily imagine that

these carts transported the estate surpluses as far as the port – for example wines

which were in demand by the people of the north. One can just as easily think

that these carts did not come back empty, and that it was in Quentovic’s market

that the monks of St Germain-des-Pr

es found a return cargo. This could well

have consisted of those basic materials, for example minerals or textiles, whose

British origin is freely underlined in our sources, or in those liturgical books

upon which the reputation of the insular scriptoria was founded.

But while the overlords and the institutions of the hinterland were installing

themselves on the shorelines and in port sites, the merchants/navigators, who

had initiated the commercial rebirth of the northern seas, going up river with

the help of those boats which they could beach anywhere, began to prospect

the continental markets. This was the case in particular of the Saxons in the

Seine basin, and of the Frisians in the Rhine basin. One imagines that what

attracted the men from Wessex into the Seine basin, and more especially into

the Paris region, was wine rather than the ceramics from La Londe discovered

in great quantities in the Hamwih excavations. In a privilege granted in 634–

635, the Frankish king Dagobert had authorised the monks of St Denis to hold

an annual fair on their patron saint’s day, 9 October, in other words around

the time of the launch of the new wines. Purely a local fair in the beginning,

it is possible that it became the great wine fair for the whole of the Paris

region. At all events, the monks of Saint-Denis drew great advantage from it

because, under the terms of the royal privilege, they were the sole beneﬁciaries

of its teloneum (‘toll’) for the duration of the fair.

Wine was sadly lacking in

Lebecq (1989) and (1993).

Chartae Latinae Antiquiores xvi, ed. Atsma and Vezin, no. 625,pp.38–41.

Devroey (1984).

DasPolyptychon von Saint-Germain-des-Pr

es, ed. H

agerman, pp. 58 and 139.

Lebecq (1989) and (2000).

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The Northern Seas (ﬁfth to eighth centuries) 657

northern countries, and so one is not surprised that a diploma of 709 mentions

the Saxons (West Saxons probably), the only foreigners referred to, as being

amongst the most assiduous customers at the St Denis fair.

A diploma of 753

adds the name of Frisians to these customers, in a position that one imagines

to be subordinate.

It was mainly in their immediate hinterland, that is, in the Rhineland,

that the Frisians made a habit of going to seek out the wine, which was so

lacking in the maritime plain. In addition they got wood, corn and local

Rhineland products – the ceramics, glassware or arms that have been found in

abundance at Dorestad and in all the major sites of northern Europe. This is

why we catch glimpses of Frisians at Trier on the Moselle, in an eighth-century

source, then at Xanten, Duisburg, Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Strasbourg and

other Rhine sites, in ninth-century sources. In several of these towns, they

created signiﬁcant settlements often connected to great religious institutions.

At Trier, for example, a Frisian gave himself with sua substantia (a fortune

which certainly included boats and slaves) to the monastery of St Maximin, in

order to do for the church’s sake what he had until then done for his own sake,

namely travel overseas. At Cologne, the Frisian settlement grew in the shadow

of the suburban church of St G

eon, and was no doubt dependent upon and

under its protection. At Duisburg, the Frisians worked in the service of the

abbey of Prum, that had a landing stage at the conﬂuence of the Ruhr and the

Rhine. At Worms, the Frisians appear as the only foreign merchants running a

market overlooked by the cathedral church.

Given these conditions, one can

believe that the complaint formulated towards 826 by Ermold the Black against

the Frisionibus atque marinis (‘the Frisians and the seafaring people’) who came

right into the upper valley of the Rhine to carry off everything that Alsace

and the Vosges produced – in particular wine, corn and wood – was not mere

rhetoric.

In all these cases, the presence and demands of the merchants/navigators

from the north could only have stimulated the activity of these old cities,

of their suburban churches and of their riverside port sites, which they fre-

quented in great numbers. This happened to such an extent that, from the

seventh century, the whole of the hinterland of the northern seas enjoyed a

tangible improvement in the conditions for trade and enjoyed the beneﬁts

of a relative peace. Above all it beneﬁted from the progressive integration of

pockets of production into organised estates, upon which the dependent peas-

ants and the small peasant farmers, granted real freedom of management, were

judged to be economically more productive than the prebendary slaves who

Chartae Latinae Antiquiores xiv, ed. Atsma and Vezin, no. 586,pp.49–54.

Chartae Latinae Antiquiores xv, ed. Atsma and Vezin, no. 598,pp.15–21.

Lebecq (1983).

Ermoldus Nigellus, Premi

ere

ıtre au roi P

epin, lines 97–120.

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658 st

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had worked the old latifundia.Itisclear that each one of the two economic

agents (the producer in the hinterland and the merchant from the sea) exercised

a decisive inﬂuence on the activities and performance of the other. In parti-

cular – to take only the best-documented example from our sources – that the

merchant/navigator stimulated the productivity of the wine-producer, and the

wine-producer encouraged the merchant/navigator to improve his transport

system.

conclusion

The seas of northern Europe formed a single economic basin at the turn of the

eighth and ninth centuries. It was brought to life by the merchants/navigators

who went from port to port and who did not hesitate to go up river to reach

the very heart of the hinterland’s production area. From the continent, heading

north, went corn, wood and above all wine from the basins of the Loire, the

Seine and the Rhine; manufactured or half-worked products from the work-

shops of Aquitaine, the Parisian basin and the Rhine valley; linen from Frisia

and elsewhere; not to mention the silver coins, now being minted under the

control of the Carolingian monarchy, at the palace, in Dorestad, in Quentovic

and in many other workshops. From the north came slaves, metals, skins and

furs, oil from sea mammals, ivory from walruses, amber from the Baltic, and

all those other products that have left scarcely any archaeological trace. This

multifarious trade was not without its chaos, and the kings, not content with

ensuring the policing of the ports, were led to legislate and even take mea-

sures to defend their nationals against the least scrupulous merchants. The

correspondence exchanged on this subject between Charlemagne and Offa of

Mercia resulted, in 796,inwhat Frank Stenton called ‘the ﬁrst commercial

treaty in English history’.

How far we have come from the ﬁrst stumbling attempts at trading activity in

the Northern Seas of the sixth century. In the ﬁnal analysis, the development

of a true maritime economy in northern Europe from the seventh century

onwards was the result, not of the closure of the Mediterranean by Islam (this

not being achieved until later), but of the combination of three factors. First

we must recognise the vitality of the hinterland, stimulated by an agricultural

growth such as had not been seen since the third century, organised by ever

more powerful aristocracies and religious institutions, and beneﬁting from a

relative peace, the pax Carolina of early Carolingian times. Second, there was

the vitality of the maritime milieu, starting from the central regions of the

Northern Seas between south-eastern Britain and the mouth of the Rhine and

Stenton (1971), p. 221.

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The Northern Seas (ﬁfth to eighth centuries) 659

which then extended to new horizons, from Ireland as far as Scandinavia. This

milieu beneﬁted from technical innovations in the art of sailing, and spread in

all directions the use of silver coin, much better adapted to the volume and the

value of the trade. Finally we have the coming together of these two dynamic

forces in the median places of trade: the great coastal monasteries, the markets,

the fairs, the riverside cities with their suburbia and their churches, the river

ports and especially the sea ports.

All that remains of Henri Pirenne’s theory is that the centre of gravity in

the west shifted well and truly from the south towards the north, and that the

role played by the Mediterranean in the sixth century was then taken up by

the seas of northern Europe. These latter, in the seventh and eighth centuries,

became the principal axis for long-distance trade, an axis extended after the

eighth century as far as the Baltic, and as a result, ready to link up with the

Near East and Far East by the Russian river routes. The increase in trafﬁc over

this new trade route, which for several centuries was to take over from the

old Mediterranean route, perhaps ﬁnds its best expression in an archaeological

discovery: in the heart of Sweden, a few metres away from each other on the

Helgo site but at the same eighth-century level, lay a crozier of Irish origin and

a statuette of Buddha originating from Kashmir.

But,by penetrating Scandinavian waters with these formidable ‘calling cards’

of wine, arms and silver, the merchants/navigators of the west did more than

introduce the Vikings to the use of sail, for they also attracted the greedy eyes of

the latter to their ships, their navigation routes, their ports, their churches and,

ﬁnally, their lands. The ﬁrst attacks by these northern pirates on the coast of

Northumberland (Lindisfarne, 793) and on the coasts of Frisia (810) undoubt-

edly marked the start of another era. It was only after two centuries of disrup-

tion to the maritime links by these predators from the north that a new trade

atlas would be sketched out, round about the year 1000.Its horizons would

be extended to match the Viking voyages of discovery (from Newfoundland

to the White Sea and to the rivers of Russia). There would be a new distri-

bution of ports, with the old ones, too exposed and too fragile, giving way

to new sites, better rooted in their environment and better protected, and

there would be a new generation of animateurs. The Frisians, Anglo-Saxons,

Franks and Celts would give way to Iro-Scandinavians, to Anglo-Danes, to

Flemings, to those from the Meuse and, later, to those from the Hanseatic

lands.

Hodges and Whitehouse (1983).

chapter 24

MONEY AND COINAGE

Mark Blackburn

Coinage in the Roman world in the early ﬁfth century consisted of a multi-

denominational system in gold, silver and bronze.

By the eighth century the

coinage of western Europe was entirely of silver essentially in one denomi-

nation, the thin broad Carolingian penny. The change from a classical to a

medieval coinage was radical, but the way in which it came about was neither

sudden nor dramatic. It was a gradual process of transformation and evolu-

tion. This chapter will trace those developments from the earliest Germanic

coinages of the ﬁfth century to the introduction of the silver penny in the late

seventh century, at which point the story is picked up in the second volume of

the NewCambridge Medieval History.

The late fourth and ﬁfth centuries saw the movement and resettlement of

the peoples of central and eastern Europe on a scale that is unprecedented in

historical times. Mostof the tribesthat settled within the former RomanEmpire

and established new Germanic states had at some stage acted as mercenaries

for or concluded treaties with the emperor, which instilled in them a degree

of respect for imperial authority, albeit a precarious one. They would have

obtained substantial amounts of coin, mainly gold, as mercenaries, in tribute

and as plunder, which gave them experience in dealing with money, even if they

had not struck coins of their own before moving into the Empire. This was, no

doubt, a factor in encouraging the continuity of circulation and minting that

we ﬁnd in most of the newly established Germanic kingdoms. Only in England

and the northern fringes of Gaul did the circulation of coinage cease for a while

after the collapse of the Roman administration. There the use of money had

to be relearnt a century or more later from their Germanic neighbours.

The coinages of most of the new states passed through two phases: a ‘pseudo-

imperial’ phase in which the coins purported to be issued with the authority

For surveys of late Roman coinage see Grierson and Mays (1992) and Kent (1994); for early medieval

European coinages other than Byzantine see Grierson and Blackburn (1986); and for Byzantine

coinage see Grierson (1982), Hendy (1985) and Hahn (2000).

660

Money and coinage 661

of the current or some former emperor, and a ‘national’ phase in which the

inscriptions and designs deliberately reﬂectedthe state’s independence. For each

kingdom this change came at different times and was expressed in different

ways. The ﬁrst to suppress all reference to the empire on their silver and bronze

coins in the late ﬁfth century were Odovacar in Italy (brieﬂy) and the Vandals

in North Africa. The Visigoths and Franks both transformed their coinages

in the later sixth century, the ﬁrst adopting an overtly regal currency and the

second choosing to permit a variety of semi-private issues. A century later the

Lombards in Italy were the last to relinquish the imperial tradition by adopting

a combination of regal and municipal coinages. Of course, ofﬁcial Byzantine

issues continued in their remaining possessions in central Italy, Sicily and parts

of the Balkans.

Although there are few written texts that shed light on the nature of money

in the early Middle Ages, the coins themselves have survived in substantial

quantity, and by studying their inscriptions, designs, dies, weights, metallic

compositions and ﬁnd contexts we can achieve some understanding of the

monetary systems in which they were used. In the late Roman Empire coin

production had been concentrated in a small number of mints, amounting

in the west to four in Italy (Rome, Ravenna, Milan and Aquileia) and three

in Gaul (Arles, Lyons and Trier); the London mint, having closed in 325, was

perhaps revived during the 380s and Barcelona had operated brieﬂy under the

usurper Maximus (410–411). By the seventh century there were still only a

handful of mints in Italy, but several hundreds in Gaul, perhaps ﬁfty in Spain

and a few in England. Coin production thus remained essentially within the

bounds of the old Roman Empire, but, as one might expect, with a much

greater degree of local minting.

In the fourth century an elaborate range of denominations had been issued

by the Romans in three metals – gold, silver and bronze – but in the early ﬁfth

century production in silver and bronze was severely reduced. In Gaul and

Britain the silver coins in circulation were clipped down to reduce their weight

and the few new ones struck in Gaul were produced to a much reduced weight

standard. Bronze was limited to the smallest denomination, the nummus.Only

the gold coinage was produced on a moderate scale, and came to dominate

the currency. Of the three denominations in gold – the solidus, its half the

semissis and its third the tremissis – the largest and smallest formed the basis

of most coinages in western Europe in the succeeding two centuries. Thus the

dominance of gold, which is so striking a feature of early medieval coinage of

the sixth and seventh centuries, was already established under the later western

emperors.

Gold had a special status that went beyond its high intrinsic value, for it was

regarded as an imperial metal that should always carry an emperor’s name – if

662 ma rk b lackburn

the current emperor was politically unacceptable, then an earlier one would

sufﬁce. Lesser rulers put their own names on their gold coinage at their

peril, as with the Frankish king Theodebert (534–548) who was severely crit-

icised by Procopius for having the impertinence to do so: ‘it is not con-

sidered right...forany...sovereign in the whole barbarian world to

imprint his own likeness on a gold stater’.

Silver and bronze were quite a

different matter, and rulers were more conﬁdent in recording their names

on these, with or without that of the emperor. It was this convention, the

emperor’s prerogative in respect of gold, that perpetuated the pseudo-imperial

phase.

The coinages of the Visigoths, Sueves, Franks, Burgundians, Anglo-Saxons

and Lombards were essentially mono-metallic in gold, with some very limited

and local issues of small silver and bronze coins. Even in the Byzantine Empire

silver had fallen out of use save for ceremonial purposes, and there was noth-

ing to bridge the very high-value gold denominations and the small bronze

minimi.However, in the late ﬁfth century Odovacar and then the Ostrogoths

succeeded in re-establishing in Italy an impressive range of denominations in

all three metals, providing an adequate currency for all types of transactions.

Likewise in North Africa the Vandals re-established a range of silver and bronze

denominations, but unusually without any gold coins. In both regions after the

reconquests of the 530s and 540s, Justinian maintained the production of silver

and bronze. By the third quarter of the sixth century, however, the minting of

silver coins in Europe was conﬁned essentially to Ravenna, and its economic

impact was minimal.

Precious metals were more valuable in the early Middle Ages than they are

today, and the standard gold coins were, therefore, very high denominations.

A solidus, for example, bought 90 kg of butchered pork in Rome in 452,so

it was hardly suitable for domestic transactions.

The nummus,bycontrast,

was a very low-value coin, ﬂuctuating between 7200 and 12,000 nummi to the

solidus in the ﬁfth and sixth centuries. A building-labourer in the early sixth

century could earn 200 nummi a day.

italy and north africa

It is not surprising that Italy, which saw the strongest survival of Roman cul-

ture and institutions, should show not merely continuity in its coinage but

development inﬂuenced by traditional Roman practice. Odovacar (476–493),

a high-ranking army ofﬁcer of mixed Germanic/Hunnish origin, ruled Italy

not as a usurper but on behalf of the last western emperor, Julius Nepos, from

Procopius, Bell. Goth. ii.33.5–6.

Spufford (1988), p. 8.