A definitive study of coin production in medieval England, tracing the development, significance and wider context of mints and money.

Money could be as essential to everyday life in medieval England as it is today, but who made the coinage, how was it used and why is it important? This definitive study charts the development of coin production from the small workshops of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England to the centralised factory mints of the late Middle Ages, the largest being in the Tower of London. Martin Allen investigates the working lives of the people employed in the mints in unprecedented detail and places the mints in the context of medieval England's commerce and government, showing the king's vital interest in the production of coinage, the maintenance of its quality and his mint revenue. This unique source of reference also offers the first full history of the official exchanges in the City of London regulating foreign exchange and an in-depth analysis of the changing size and composition of medieval England's coinage.

If there is a central theme of this volume, it is the supply of money in circulation, rather than the importance of money, per se . It was this circulation that determined the movement of prices, of trade, and of credit - in short, it was this that underpinned the commercialisation of the economy, and therefore was the most important medieval money matter.

Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages presents an original and valuable set of studies into aspects of a critical but challenging category of material.

This is a full-scale study that explores every aspect of money in Europe and the Middle Ages.

The sixteen articles in this collection analyse the contribution made by overseas trade, and the wealth in coin which it created, to the development of the English economy and locate this in an European-wide setting. In time, they range from the late Anglo-Saxon period up to the advent of the Tudors. The papers include general surveys of the importance of coinage and credit in the rise and decline of a market economy, and of the way that credit functioned in a society that lacked reliable supplies of bullion and which was also subject to the scourges of warfare and devastating disease. They illustrate, too, how from the tenth century the English crown used its control and exploitation of the coinage as part of a sophisticated fiscal system which helped create the precocious power of the English state. The author further shows how the wool trade altered the geographical pattern of wealth and enriched peasants, landowners and merchants, while the competing interests involved in the trade also cause political conflicts in Parliament and in the government of London during the period when London was establishing itself as the political capital and the financial centre of the kingdom.

Reading Medieval Sources is an exciting new series which leads scholars and students into some of the most challenging and rewarding sources from the European Middle Ages, and introduces the most important approaches to understanding them. Written by an international team of twelve leading scholars, this volume Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages presents a set of fresh and insightful perspectives that demonstrate the rich potential of this source material to all scholars of medieval history and culture. It includes coverage of major developments in monetary history, set into their economic and political context, as well as innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives that address money and coinage in relation to archaeology, anthropology and medieval literature. Contributors are Nanouschka Myrberg Burström, Elizabeth Edwards, Gaspar Feliu, Anna Gannon, Richard Kelleher, Bill Maurer, Nick Mayhew, Rory Naismith, Philipp Robinson Rössner, Alessia Rovelli, Lucia Travaini, and Andrew Woods.

This groundbreaking study of coinage in early medieval England is the first to take account of the very significant additions to the corpus of southern English coins discovered in recent years and to situate this evidence within the wider historical context of Anglo-Saxon England and its continental neighbours. Its nine chapters integrate historical and numismatic research to explore who made early medieval coinage, who used it and why. The currency emerges as a significant resource accessible across society and, through analysis of its production, circulation and use, the author shows that control over coinage could be a major asset. This control was guided as much by ideology as by economics and embraced several levels of power, from kings down to individual craftsmen. Thematic in approach, this innovative book offers an engaging, wide-ranging account of Anglo-Saxon coinage as a unique and revealing gauge for the interaction of society, economy and government.

The importance of money as one of the key variables in the workings of the medieval economy is often overlooked. This new study first provides the reader with a background to the problems of modeling the medieval economy and the value of the Fisher equation of exchange to monetary historians, to the practical processes of striking coins from silver and gold acquired through foreign trade and to the importance of royal control over mints and exchanges. These theories are then used to analyze how money worked within the economy of the early, central, and late middle ages with fluctuations in the size of the circulating medium and the availability of credit acting as either a brake on or a stimulus to economic expansion. A full money economy did not emerge until c. 1300, but its existence and flexibility helped the economy survive the severe shocks of the late middle ages.