In 1988, Peter Spufford's Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe reached beyond the specialized world of numismatics. Reminding us that the "proper subject-matter of the historian is past men and women and their actions," he traced how medieval Europeans recovered and built upon the monetary system of Rome. [1] Europe went from using coin as a commodity in unilateral payments to "Dark Age" lords to relying on them as the underpinning of credit and finance in the commercial reawakening of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. [2] Spufford's text along with the works of Carlo Cipolla, Robert Lopez and the dean of medieval numismatists, Phillip Grierson, allowed historians who had never held a medieval coin the confidence to integrate numismatic evidence into their work. In Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages, Rory Naismith has brought together a diverse group of scholars, not all historians, who ask us to again consider the importance of coins in unlocking the medieval past. The question that comes to mind is how do these essays take us beyond Spufford?
In his introduction, Naismith indirectly addresses this question, hoping that the "methodological eclecticism" of the volume brings it "beyond" traditional numismatics and monetary history (9-11). Part One, "Thinking about Medieval Money," is comprised of two chapters tasked with broadly examining the nature of money. Gaspar Feliu's "Money and Currency," however, amounts to a brief outline of events from the "scarcity of cash during the barbarian centuries" (36) to the bi-metallic systems of the Italian city republics. While his survey will be useful to the non-specialist, particularly his explanation of moneys of account, it is reliant on older authors such as Cipolla, Marc Bloch, Jean Gautier Dalché and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. Bill Maurer in "Money Orders" questions the "just-so" origin story that money arises from barter by reviewing several schools of thought mainly drawn from the discipline of anthropology. The most intriguing of these, at least with respect to medieval Europe, is law-professor Christine Desan's argument that money is a "constitutional project" initiated by "stakeholders," be they kings or "organizations such as cities and commercial groups" (51).
Part Two of the volume, in four chapters, provides the meat and potatoes of medieval monetary history, reviewing the history of coinage in the Latin west from c.400 to 1500. Such a review is warranted in light of what Desan has called a "revolution in numismatic evidence" thanks to the advent of metal detectors. [3] Chapter 4 by Alessia Rovelli and chapter 5 by Andrew Woods combine to cover the early Middle Ages (c. 400-1150). The main theme here is the collapse of the Roman tri-metallic system of gold, silver and bronze and the emergence of the silver denarius as the common coin of Latin Europe. Both authors address the old question of monetization or to what extent did people use coins in this period. Rovelli emphasizes that despite metal detectors the number of reported finds on the continent are still quite low. For example, outside of four hoards, there are only 124 single coin finds known for Pepin III (r.751-768). Woods cautions that estimating the volume of currency depends not just on finds but on identifying the number of dies used to strike a particular coin type. Still, based on the number of single coin finds, he first concludes that England in the eighth century "emerges as a peak for the use of currency." After briefly considering charter evidence, however, he confusingly adds "that there were substantial falls in the amounts of money in use in England, particularly in the late eighth century" (115-116). There is also some slight confusion surrounding the reform of Charlemagne (r.768-814). Rovelli correctly tells us that Pepin kept his denarius close to 1.3 grams, and Charlemagne raised its weight to 1.7 grams (81). Woods inadvertently implies that Charlemagne increased the weight of his father's coin to 1.3 grams (95).
These minor inconsistencies aside, Woods gives us a solid narrative of events after the Carolingians, focusing on the adoption of money in Viking-age Scandinavia and the expansion of minting in Germany with the opening of the Goslar mines in the late tenth century. In the next chapter, Richard Kelleher tackles what Lopez labeled the "commercial revolution" of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When this period opened the Carolingian monetary system was basically unchanged with the denarius "virtually the sole denomination" throughout Europe (125). Denarii, however, were now struck by a vast array of "stakeholders," from kings and secular lords to cathedral chapters, abbeys and town communes. As trade intensified, particularly with the Muslim world, new denominations emerged--heavy silver pieces or grossi along with an array of high-value gold coins. Kelleher is at his best when discussing England and France but slightly less so in dealing with the Mediterranean. The numerous appearances of the term bezant in the Pipe Rolls and other English records from c.1170-1250 almost certainly do not refer to the hyperpyron of Constantinople. Italian merchants used the term bezant generically for the various dinars of the Mediterranean; the bezants making their way to England were likely the popular Almoravid morabetinos and their Christian imitations. Concerning the latter, there is no indication that the Leonese morabetino was of poor quality as Kelleher suggests though the Portuguese version certainly declined. Likewise his statement that "in 1240 Arab types gave way to the double dinar, or dobla, in Castile, Portugal and Aragon" needs qualification (141-142). The dobla was what the Christians called the Almohad heavy, or double, dinar. Jamie I of Aragon (1213-1276) licensed counterfeits of it in the 1270s, while Alfonso X of Castile-León (1252-84) produced one in his own name around the same time. There is no evidence for a Portuguese dobla until the fourteenth century. [4]
To conclude the general narrative of part two, Phillipp Robinson Rössner takes up the unenviable task of covering the years 1350-1500 in chapter 7. The fourteenth century, "calamitous" in many respects, was dominated monetarily by what Spufford called the "scourge of debasement." Rössner, however, chooses a broad approach with sections entitled "What is Money?" and "What Stories Does Money Tell Us?" Additionally non sequiturs and dense prose often obscure his meaning. Still in his final pages, the author does briefly address the dilemma governments faced in minting both high value gold and silver pieces while also keeping the populace supplied with common denarii. It was this "big problem of the petty coins," to borrow Cipolla's phrase, that helped fuel the cycle of debasement in the late middle ages.
Part Three of the volume, "Themes in the Study of Medieval Money and Coinage," returns to Naismith's promise to go "beyond" standard monetary history. His own contribution "Money and Society," explores the idea that monetization depends on money being "versatile and capable of being transferred between people and situations" (196). While we may take this premise for granted, the reality was that "all segments of medieval society had to deal with fundamental practical problems posed by their currency" (185). If the typical laborer made four denarii a day, what did one use to purchase a loaf of bread? Naismith also returns to Desan's concept of money as a "constitutional project" exploring the interplay between "stakeholder" and the users of currency. Edward I (1272-1307) of England's insistence that foreign imitative coins (crokards and pollards) circulate at half the English denarius while many of his subjects discounted them even lower is a classic example that perhaps deserves more elaboration here.
In "Money and the Economy," Nicholas Mayhew looks at the extent to which coinage had a "real" effect on the overall economy. Where Rovelli and Woods briefly address the issue of monetization in the early Middle Ages, Mayhew uses mint output data from thirteenth and fourteenth-century England to examine the relationship between money supply and velocity of circulation as it was affected by such factors as the availability of credit and demographic growth. Drawing on his own work reaching back decades, Mayhew offers a clear analysis that helps take some of the fear out of the Fisher Equation. One only wonders if the chapter may not have been better assigned to Part Two for the light it sheds on the later medieval economy.
The final four chapters fall well outside the parameters of traditional monetary history, looking at coins in the context of archeology, literature, and art. Nanouschka Myrberg Burström, citing the archeologist's dictum that "money does not only have economic functions," illustrates how "homo anthropologicus" rather than "homo economicus" employed coins (234-236). The use of Roman pieces in later Anglo-Saxon graves provides us with a good example. She also outlines how archeologists use coins to help interpret finds; her discussion of the mass grave from the site of the battle of Visby, fought in 1361, is gory but intriguing in this regard. The next two essays are fairly specialized and require the uninitiated to read carefully. Elizabeth Edwards' "Money and Literature" takes as its premise "that money always had moral and libidinal understandings that supplemented the simple Aristotelian account of money as a means and a medium of utility" (266). In "Art in the Round," Anna Gannon explores the influence of Roman, Celtic and Merovingian iconography on the early gold coinage of the Anglo-Saxons as well as the subsequent denarii called sceattas. In the closing chapter, Lucia Travaini also examines the importance of iconography. Drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of European coinage, she provides sundry examples of "how conscious rulers could be of coinage as an expression of identity" (324). She also proposes instances of coins serving as identity markers for individuals other than the issuing authority such as pilgrims leaving their native coins at shrines "in their desire to leave a trace of themselves" (377).
Overall Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages can be read profitably alongside Spufford. As Naismith hopes, it "leaves the reader with as many ideas and questions as it does answers" (16). But that is not entirely a positive attribute. Several of the contributors faced the very hard challenge of writing in English although it is not their first language. Their essays deserved to be more closely edited though such work is time-consuming and often painful. Brill has billed this volume as the first in a series called Reading Medieval Sources. If the series is to be accessible to non-specialists, close attention must be paid to readability. Secondly, Money and Coinage is obviously aimed at the non-numismatists. It is a shame, then, that the illustrations of the coins were not provided with transcriptions of their legends. Often times the significance an author attaches to a coin depends on what the piece says. Even the trained-eye cannot read some of the specimens reproduced here. Nonetheless, Naismith and his colleagues enthusiastically demonstrate that the study of money offers many paths to understanding the men and women of medieval Europe. Peter Spufford, who passed in 2017, would be proud.
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Notes:
1. Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), xii.
2. Carlo M. Cipolla, Money, Prices and Civilization in the Mediterranean World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 3-12.
3. Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40.
4. Botet y Sisó, Joaquin. Les monedes catalanes. 3 vols. (Barcelona: Institut d'Estudis Catalans, l908-11) 3: 265; Miquel Crusafont, Anna M. Balaguer and Philip Grierson,Medieval European Coinage, Vol. 6,The Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 307-308; 443-444; 450-451.