Anglo-Saxon Coinage c. 600 - 1066

It never rains but it pours ... with good news.

Congratulations to Dr Rory Naismith, who has just been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to work on Anglo-Saxon coinage in the period c. 600 - 1066. Rory outlines his research project here:

This project is aimed at the preparation of a new volume in the series Medieval European Coinage, published by Cambridge University Press and inaugurated – with support from the Leverhulme Trust - in the early 1980s by Professor Philip Grierson (1910–2006) and his first research assistant Mark Blackburn (1953–2011). Volumes so far published have dealt with early medieval Europe as a whole, along with parts of Spain and Italy. My own volume will be focused on England in the period c. 600–1066. It will contain a fully illustrated catalogue of some 2,500 coins in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as a new commentary and introduction. The gold and silver coins of these centuries illustrate the slow metamorphosis from sub-Roman gold shillings, made when Christianity was freshly arrived in England, to the famously sophisticated late Anglo-Saxon coinage, one of the most impressive monetary systems in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe. They show the development of kingship, Christian culture and a dynamic economy, often more vividly than any other source. The coins therefore constitute a resource of critical importance to many branches of scholarship, including archaeology and history as well as numismatics. My goal is to provide a fresh and authoritative survey of the full range of Anglo-Saxon coinage, embracing new research and innovative approaches, as well as the impact of numerous new metal-detected finds. It will be the first survey of the whole period to be published in several decades, and the first in more than a century accompanied by such a broad and representative collection.