Mints and money in medieval England

Abstract

In 1992 Cambridge University Press published A new history of the Royal Mint, which provided an authoritative survey of the organisation of minting in England from the seventh century to the twentieth. When I embarked upon the research for a Ph.D. thesis on the Durham mint in 1993 it quickly became my indispensable ‘Bible’ on English mints and minting, but I also became acutely aware of its inevitable limitations. The authors of the chapters covering the medieval period were severely constrained by the space available and by the need to weave all of the aspects of minting into one more or less chronological narrative, and they were unable to do more than skim the surface of the vast quantity of unpublished manuscript sources available. Christopher Challis’s book on The Tudor coinage had shown what could be achieved by applying an analytical framework to a thorough survey of the documentary evidence, looking at mint organisation, the sources of bullion for the coinage, the composition and size of the currency, and the role of government. Since 1997 I have had the great privilege of working in the Department of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and this has given me the opportunity to apply Challis’s analytical methods to a much broader period, from Edgar’s reform of the English coinage in the 970s to Henry VIII’s debasement of it in 1544 (which can be regarded as the true end of medieval traditions of minting in England).