Early medieval coins: sceattas, pennies, deniers and Viking issues

For most of the early Middle Ages a coin in north-west Europe meant one small silver piece, the ancestor of the penny. Larger values were reckoned, not struck: twelve pence made a shilling and 240 a pound, but no shilling or pound coin existed. Hoards of the period are therefore mostly heaps of these little coins, and their dates, mints and moneyers' names are what allow archaeologists to date everything else buried with them.

The earliest Anglo-Saxon coins were small gold pieces of the 7th century, now called thrymsas; the Crondall hoard from Hampshire, found in 1828, held 97 of them. From about 680 silver took over in the form of the sceat (plural sceattas), a thick little coin usually weighing between 0.8 and 1.3 g, struck in England, Frisia and Jutland. Sceattas rarely name a king; they carry birds, beasts, busts and crosses instead, and are now often called 'early pennies'. In the Frankish kingdom, Pepin the Short reorganised the silver coinage in 755, and Charlemagne's reform of around 793-4 introduced a heavier, broader denier of about 1.7 g, with a cross and his monogram or name. In England, Offa of Mercia (757-796) adopted the broad, thin penny in the 780s, and that coin, with the king's name and usually his portrait on one side and the moneyer's name on the other, was the English currency for centuries afterwards.

Viking settlers struck coins too. In the Southern Danelaw, a coinage in the name of St Edmund, the East Anglian king killed by a Viking army in 869, ran for some twenty years from about 895, probably until Edward the Elder took back the region in 917-18. The Cuerdale hoard alone contained between 1,800 and 1,850 of them. At York, coins name the otherwise almost unknown kings Siefred and Cnut, who are usually placed about 895-905; Cuerdale held some 3,000 Cnut pennies, many with the puzzling mint name CUNNETTI. The later St Peter coinage of York mixes a saint's name with swords and, on some coins, what looks like Thor's hammer.

To recognise the main groups: sceattas are small (about 10-13 mm) and thick, with lively, often crude images and few letters; Carolingian deniers and Anglo-Saxon pennies are broader and thinner, with legible Latin legends naming a king and a mint or moneyer; Viking issues copy these models, sometimes with garbled lettering. Pennies were often cut into halves and quarters for small change, and in Viking hoards whole coins may be nicked or pecked to test the silver.

Coins are the timekeepers of early medieval hoards. A hoard cannot have been buried before its latest coin was struck, and when issues are well dated, as English pennies of the 9th to 11th centuries are, the margin can be a few years. The two-emperor pennies of Alfred of Wessex and Ceolwulf II of Mercia in the Watlington hoard have changed how historians read Mercian politics in the 870s, and the more than 5,000 pennies of Æthelred II and Cnut the Great in the Lenborough hoard show the scale of English coin production in the early 11th century.