Numismatic entertainment

Once I had discovered the coin collection in Leeds University Library and begun to put it to work in my teaching, the convenors of the Leeds Medieval Group were not long in asking me if I might be able to put on some kind of event using the coins for them. We set this up for 25th April 2016, under the title, “Medieval Coins for Beginners: A Workshop”, and I planned it very loosely, because I didn’t at all know what sort of audience to expect: Medieval Group draws people from well outside its host department and indeed from outside the university, so levels of expertise or interest were hard to gauge. After a year at the Barber I was pretty sure I could manage whatever the needs were. As it turned out, basically everybody who came was one of the department’s historians, with one postgraduate looking worried among them. This worked well for me, as I have a sort of undeclared mission to get someone other than me in the department using the coins, so I asked the gathering what they were hoping to get from the workshop, and one of my colleagues whom I will not identify declared loftily, “I want to be entertained.”¹ Well, that I could do, but it is of course a trick that can be repeated here, so this post is three of the little stories of coins that I told all that time ago.

Obverse of an Æ3 of Constantine I struck at Rome in 314, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Thackray Collection, CC/TH/ROM/IMP/400

Reverse of an Æ3 of Constantine I struck at Rome in 314, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Thackray Collection, CC/TH/ROM/IMP/400

So, let me start with a teaching point of which I never tire. This is a chunk of small change struck for the Emperor Constantine I, at Rome in 314, a couple of years after he had taken over that city by defeating his rival Maxentius, who drowned in the retreat. We don’t know what the small-change coins of this period were called, but these ones are half the size of the biggest, and numismatists unhelpfully call them Æ3s in print and then struggle over how to say that out loud to each other. Anyway! The teaching point is that in the year between his defeat of Maxentius and the issue of this coin in the city where he’d done that, Constantine, along with his colleague Licinius I, had famously legalised the practise of Christianity within the Empire with their 313 Edict of Milan. Many historians will still tell you, faithfully following the testimony of Constantine’s biographer Bishop Eusebius of Cæsarea, that Constantine himself was Christian by this stage.² These coins show nothing of that, however: on the reverse Constantine is proclaimed Soli invicto comiti, “(to the) Companion of the Unconquered Sun”. It may have been possible to see Sol the sun-god and Christ as somehow reflections of the same divinity, but the type had also been used by the pagan emperors Aurelian and Diocletian, the latter of whom was one of the persecuting emperors whom it seems safe to say was not after an expression of Christian syncretism on his money. Basically, whatever his personal religious convictions were, they didn’t change Constantine’s coinage at all (barring three very very rare types, of which much too much has been made given how drowned they were by continuing pagan issues).³

Obverse of a copper-alloy 40-nummi of Emperor Justin II struck at Nicomedia in 574-575, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Thackray Collection, CC-TH-BYZ-227 (not to scale)

Reverse of a copper-alloy 40-nummi of Emperor Justin II struck at Nicomedia in 574-575, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Thackray Collection, CC-TH-BYZ-227 (likewise not to scale)

Two hundred and fifty years down the line and the emperors now ruled from Constantinople, while Rome had been lost and won back several times, even in the living memory of Emperor Justin II for whom this 40-nummi coin, which I showed you a few posts ago, was issued at Nicomedia (modern-day Iznik) in 574-575. We can date it because, unlike almost any other ancient or medieval coins, Byzantine small change between 532 and around 700 carried regnal dates; we don’t know why this was done—why are there dates on our coins, after all?—but current explanations don’t seem adequate.⁴ In any case, the teaching point here is that you will note that there are two figures on the coin. That’s apparently because Justin II, who was not a well man for much of his reign, ruled with the aid of his Empress Sophia, who therefore seems to have got onto the coins. She only appears on the small change, however, and alongside her husband, whereas all precedents for empresses on imperial coins so far had them having coins of their own struck, and mostly in gold. More bewilderingly, a close look at this coin will reveal that the inscription, δN IVζTINVS PP AVC (Dominus noster Iustinus perpetuus Augustus, our Lord Justin Eternal Emperor) names only the emperor. Just one mint, Carthage in North Africa, struck these coins with the empress’s name on too. Otherwise she is visibly there but in some sense unrecorded, and one could make that into a cunning representation of the real political situation but then Carthage’s practice becomes very hard to explain; as far as we know she wasn’t from there or anything. Who made these choices and why is a question that has been keeping people occupied for a good long while, and probably will some time longer.⁵

Obverse of a silver penny of King Harold II struck at Canterbury in 1066, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Winchester Collection, uncatalogued

Reverse of a silver penny of King Harold II struck at Canterbury in 1066, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Winchester Collection, uncatalogued

Lastly something closer to home, the above is one of the relatively few silver pennies that there was time for King Harold II of England to issue in 1066, this one struck at Canterbury by the moneyer Eadwine, which is proclaimed abbreviatedly on the reverse. Harold’s presentation here is interesting, not least because of how Byzantine it is, with a cross-sceptre and a diadem. The leftwards profile portrait was normal in England at this time, and would be changed for an even more Byzantine facing one by the Normans, presumably unbeknownst to Harold, though he obviously knew that the Normans were a danger. The coin is involved in some quite deliberate political signalling, therefore; not only are there these signs of royalty attached to someone whose family had never previously been royal, but the reverse message is one simple word, PAX, Peace. Of course, Harold’s promise here would prove empty. Ironically—or not?—William the Conqueror’s coins would also use a PAX legend of a kind, but then he could reasonably say that unlike Harold he’d been able to achieve it. That debate has since continued at least as far as Sir Walter Scott, of course, but it’s interesting to be able to see it happening at the time on one of the few public image tools available to a medieval régime.⁶

So there you have it, stories to tell with three of the sixteen coins I took with me into that workshop, and I hope that they provide some entertainment for you also!

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1. That colleague’s anonymity will be protected, but honourable mention here must go to Dr Alan Murray, who was using the coins to teach with even before I arrived and who is so far still the only other person in the School of History to do so except on my modules. I’ll get them one day though!

2. Eusebius is now best got at in Eusebius, Life of Constantine, ed. & transl. Averil Cameron & Stuart G. Hall (Oxford 1999), and for bigger background my students seem to do best with Charles M. Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, 2nd edn. (London 2010), which does include the coinage as part of its source base.

3. The debate on Constantine’s conversion is almost too tedious to cite, but try Raymond Van Dam, “The Many Conversions of the Emperor Constantine” in Kenneth Mills & Anthony Grafton (edd.), Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (Rochester 2003), pp. 127–151, for an account of it; on the coin types, a dose of quantitative common sense is provided by Patrick Bruun, “The Christian Signs on the Coinage of Constantine”, in idem, Studies in Constantinian Numismatics: Papers from 1954 to 1988 (Rome 1991), pp. 53–69.

4. See Jonathan Jarrett, “Middle Byzantine Numismatics in the Light of Franz Füeg’s Corpora of Nomismata” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 177 (London 2018 for 2017), pp. 514–535 at pp. 515-516 & n. 9 for a short round-up of this question.

5. Leslie Brubaker and Helen Tobler, “The Gender of Money: Byzantine Empresses on Coins (324–802)” in Gender and History Vol. 12 (Oxford 2000), pp. 572–594, repr. in Pauline Stafford and Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (edd.), Gendering the Middle Ages (Oxford 2001), pp. 42–64, gathers the evidence but even they struggle to conclude very much about the thinking behind the coins.

6. You probably don’t need a go-to reference on the Norman Conquest of England and the build-up to it but I think Brian Golding, Conquest and Colonisation: the Normans in Britain, 1066-1100 (Basingstoke 1994) is a good one; Martin Allen, “Mints and Money in Norman England” in Anglo-Norman Studies Vol. 34 (Woodbridge 2012), pp. 1-22, is a good introduction to where we are now with the coinage of the era.

Name in Print XXII

Some months ago now, in trumpeting a recent publication, I mentioned that I already had another one out, and if you noticed that, you may have wondered why I didn’t subsequently go on to trumpet that too. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of my too-typical stories of disaster; it’s just that I was waiting for a print copy to photograph by way of authenticated proof. Well, months went by and I gently enquired and it turns out I don’t get one, just fifty free e-prints that I can distribute to people. This is the new age, I guess, but it means there is no longer any reason to hold back on announcing it, so here goes!

Cover of Social History Vol. 44 issue 3 (Abingdon 2019)

Over the last couple of years I have had two major goals with my publications. The first and most immediate of these was to survive my probation in my current post; the second was to start getting my work into journals that didn’t have the word ‘medieval’ in their titles, partly so that non-medievalists learnt that I exist and partly to reassure myself that my work had some wider interest. And in an article in issue 3 of volume 44 of the well-regarded journal Social History I have managed to help my way along towards both of those goals. It’s entitled “Ceremony, charters and social memory: property transfer ritual in early medieval Catalonia”.¹

This comes ultimately from the unpublished methodological chapter that opens my doctoral thesis, but picks up one small aspect of that and expands it, that being that whereas we can tell a certain amount about how charters were written and created as objects in the early Middle Ages from the documents themselves, and something about how they were subsequently stored and used from the archives via which they have survived, we know really very little about the crucial stage in the process of a transaction in which what was in the document was made known to people.² And yet we do know that it was, usually, because we have witnesses later recalling bits of the ceremony or documents, and predictably, we have this especially in the early Middle Ages’s number one documentary databank, Catalonia. There, indeed, we have a recognised genre of documents called reparationes scripturae, ‘documentary repairs’, I guess, in which the contents of a lost document were sworn to by qualified witnesses and their written and witnessed oath then constituted a replacement for the lost charter. There’s even some old Visigothic law about this, which was quoted in some of the documents we have, if (typically) in a distorted form as needed by the situation, but weirdly, even though the documents are from quite scattered locations and times, there’s some set phrases that recur which suggest that there was a legal ceremonial behind this, of which the law makes no mention.³ More importantly, and what the article is really about, there are signs in some of the documents that there were also organised ceremonies to commit the contents of these documents to local memory, so that if witnesses were ever needed they could indeed be recalled.⁴

Title page and abstract, from the PDF

So, I argue that this is one of those places the Early Middle Ages often throws at us where literacy and orality don’t separate but rather work as a whole: the documents we have record the result of oral memory being used to shore up a documentary record, but there was also a whole oral process of community ‘archiving’ of knowledge going on here whose presumption was that social memory was a better archive than documents. I also argue that this fits into a trend others have noticed in which old Roman archiving practises were adapted, as the needs that had created them disappeared in the fifth and sixth centuries, to serve new needs that they answered, in part, with their respectability as processes even though they were technically redundant, something that when you stop and think is still all round us, things that people do even though they have no real effect that still mean something because of when they did.⁵ This is a really good example of that not being a stupid, decadent, habit but a creative repurposing of the tools at hand to do the new job. And I guess because I found that link to a bigger point, they let me into their journal! But in the meantime, also, for those who care about such things I think it’s also the last word on reparatio scripturae for now…

Statistics here: I first gave this as a paper in Lincoln in 2015, and the publication draft didn’t change a great deal; it’s effectively been through only three drafts all told, unusually clean for my work. I guess I knew what I wanted to say! The reviewers mainly wanted me to incorporate more Wendy Davies, which was a pleasure as ever and easy to do, and the journal has a quick turnaround, so it was actually only three months between sending in the final revised version and it becoming available online as a published article.⁶ When it came out in print, I don’t know, but I’m assured that it has done! So this lowers all my averages a bit, and I’m very pleased with the result. I humbly commend it to you. And since I already have two more pieces in proof as we write, and two more under review beyond that, it probably won’t be long before you see another of these posts…

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, “Ceremony, Charters and Social Memory: property transfer ritual in early medieval Catalonia” in Social History Vol. 44 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 275-295, DOI:10.1080/03071022.2019.1618570.

2. Idem, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished doctoral thesis (University of London 2005), online here, pp. 27-71 and esp. pp. 49-53, which however only addresses two of the documents used in the article.

3. There’s a limited bibliography on reparatio scripturae already, most obviously José Rius Serra, “Reparatio scriptura” in Anuario de historia del Derecho español Vol. 5 (Madrid 1928), pp. 246-253; Jeffrey A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: property, proof, and dispute in Catalonia around the year 1000 (Ithaca NY 2004), pp. 151-163; and Josep María Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic 2013), pp. 185-211. None of these deal with the apparent underlying formula, however.

4. Noted also by Salrach, Justícia i poder, p. 195, which is what really provoked the first version of my article.

5. The work referred to here is Nicholas Everett, “Lay Documents and Archives in Early Medieval Spain and Italy, c. 400–700″ in Warren C. Brown, Marios Costambeys, Matthew Innes and Adam J. Kosto (edd.), Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge 2013), pp. 63–94, and Warren C. Brown, “On the Gesta municipalia and the Public Validation of Documents in Frankish Europe” in Speculum Vol. 87 (Cambridge MA 2012), pp. 345–375, DOI: 10.1017/S0038713412001066, basically reprinted as idem, “The Gesta municipalia and the Public Validation of Documents in Frankish Europe” in Brown, Costambeys, Innes and Kosto, Documentary Culture, pp. 95–124, but with some small differences that mean you have to cite both despite them having the same title! That distresses most style sheets, I can tell you. I’ve already written about the work Warren’s done here, however, because it’s really clever.

6. The relevant work here being Wendy Davies, Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800-1000 (Abingdon 2016), about which I will be blogging in future!

Standing figure facing with two long crosses

It seems to have been a while since we had anything here about coins, so here’s a little coincidence that I notice every time I teach with it on my late-antique survey module, Empire and Aftermath. Predictably, I use coinage as a source on this, because we have a good collection to play with and it gets students involved who might not react so well to purely textual sources, but each year I do I am struck by something I remember from much longer ago in my career, which is this coin:

Obverse of an early English penny of the so-called Series L, struck at London in the late-seventh or early-eighth century, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, De Wit Collection, CM.1815-2007

Reverse of the same coin

This is an early Anglo-Saxon penny, and it’s one of the very rare ones that actually carries some legible information about its place of issue: you may not believe me, but the letters around the presumably-royal bust decode as LVNDONIA, London. How many people could have read this, given that the actual coin is about the size of most people’s little fingernails, is another question, but it does, and a sibling of this coin in the same collection was even recovered from the River Thames, so that’s nicely coherent.¹ However, today I’m more interested in the reverse imagery. Here it is bigger and clearer:

So, what can we be sure that we have here? A figure, apparently in a tunic and body-armour, with long-hair or a head-dress of some kind, holding a long cross in each hand, seems reasonable. But he or she is also standing on some kind of crescent, perhaps? And the people who have tried to read this image have therefore wondered if she or he is on a boat, and thus even perhaps a missionary bringing the Christian faith to the English peoples as had indeed happened scarcely two generations before this coin was likely struck.² It leaves the armoured-looking dress a little hard to explain, but as an iconographic reading it certainly fits its context nicely. But compare it to this one:

Copper-alloy Arab-Byzantine follis struck probably in Syria in the mid-seventh century, provenance and location unknown, though I found it in Clive Foss, Arab-Byzantine coins: an introduction, with a catalogue of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications 12 (Washington D.C. 2008), p. 32. It’s not actually part of the Dumbarton Oaks Collection, however, so I don’t know where it now is

I’m sorry that I have no better image of this, but it is one of those enigmatic coins produced in Syria during the earliest decades of Islam that I love to talk about so much.³ And here, again, we appear to have a figure, apparently in a tunic and body-armour, with long hair or a head-dress of some kind, holding a long cross in each hand, standing on some kind of crescent. And the people who have tried to read this image have not usually got much further than that it is a development or degeneration of a standing figure of the Byzantine emperor such as is seen on the later coinage of Emperor Heraclius, where he stands in campaign attire with a long cross and cross on a globe, and indeed it doesn’t seem too far a stretch. It might seem weird that a putatively Islamic issuer changes a small cross for a bigger one on a figure that is, putatively, still the emperor who no longer ruled them, but again, we have reason—from the coins!—to suspect that this was a very fluid period and we can’t, for example, be sure that the issuer of this coin wasn’t Christian and didn’t think that the emperor was still in charge, despite the current local régime change, so it’s all far from impossible.⁴

Copper-alloy 4-nummi of the Emperor Heraclius, overstruck at Constantinople onto a cut portion of an older coin, probably of Anastasius I or Justinian I, in the early seventh century, Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B3732. The coins of this type usually carry Heraclius’s son standing behind him at his left, but many, like this one, were so carelessly made that he escapes the impression

The problem thus arises only when you know about both of these coins at once. If this is one design, as it appears, then it can’t easily be both a derivative Heraclius and Saint Augustine of Canterbury or whoever, not least because the Anglo-Saxon one also has a royal or imperial bust on it. It is possible, just about, that both engravers were deriving from the bronze coinage of Heraclius, but that is very hard to imagine being available as a model in Britain, since being copper-alloy it only had value inside the Empire; a few Byzantine bronzes are known from British contexts, but very few and to my knowledge from no later than the 580s.⁵ Also, we have to explain two unconnected engravers both deciding to do exactly the same things to the same design about half a century apart. It’s even less likely, to be honest, though still not impossible, that someone brought the Arab-Byzantine coin to Britain or the Britain-based engraver had met it in Syria.⁶ There are, admittedly, other versions of this design in both Britain and Syria that come closer to their supposed archetypes, and parallel evolution is maybe more plausible than I just made it sound, but there is, thankfully, a simpler answer. It looks like these:

Copper-alloy coin of Emperor Constantine I struck at London in 310-312, private collection, image from Wildwinds under Constantine I, RIC VI 195

Silvered copper-alloy antoninianus of Empress Severina struck at Antioch in 274, CNG Coins, image from Wildwinds, Severina, under RIC 20 V

The shared reverse type between these two issues is a figure of Concordia with two military standards, personifying harmony among the soldiers, Concordia militum, sometimes such an important message for a Roman ruler to send… It’s an image that still turns up out of the ground every now and then in Britain even now, and I imagine it’s not unknown in the Middle East either, but anyone digging up Roman settlements in either place in the seventh century would have had a chance of coming across one. The design, of course, is not a bloke with two crosses, but a lady with two imperial standards, but three or four centuries later some adaptation to the times probably shouldn’t surprise us, and it’s less of an adaptation than is required to get there from Heraclius and his campaign shorts.

Now, of course, that both engravers had such an image before them explains some things, but it doesn’t tell us either what they thought their model showed or what they understood in what they turned it into. The people who think the English coin shows a saint on a boat may still be right; that may be what the engraver decided the border of the original design meant, or even what it could mean; there was all kinds of scope for invention here.⁷ Likewise, in Syria, the choice to super-Christianize what had been a secular and indeed pagan image could have a lot of possible meanings, but they could certainly have been deliberate. By suggesting a model I don’t mean to suggest that the engravers of the coins didn’t have anything of their own in mind. But I do think it’s kind of cute that to do that, they themselves were probably engaged in exactly the same game as that we’re playing here, trying to figure out what was shown on these coins from hundreds of years before their own time.

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1. There’s an absolutely huge literature on early Anglo-Saxon pennies, or sceattas as they’re widely known, and no space here to try to list it all, but the introductory discussion to coins like these particular ones that I use for students is Rory Naismith, “Money of the Saints: Church and Coinage in Early Anglo-Saxon England” in Tony Abramson (ed.), Studies in Early Medieval Coinage, 3: Sifting the Evidence (London 2014), pp. 68–121.

2. E. g. Catherine Karkov, “The Boat and the Cross: Church and State in Early Anglo-Saxon Coinage”, in Tony Abramson (ed.), Studies in Early Medieval Coinage 2: New Perspectives (Woodbridge 2011), pp. 63–71.

3. Citation is in the caption, obviously, but Foss is also a pretty good guide to the whole coinage, at least if you are prepared to be more relaxed about chronology than he wants to be.

4. Helpful here, or at least I find it so, is Marcus Phillips, “The Import of Byzantine Coins to Syria Revisited” in Tony Goodwin (ed.), Arab-Byzantine Coins and History (London 2012), pp. 39–72.

5. Known to me from gossip but also from Tony Abramson, Coinage in the Northumbrian landscape and economy, c. 575–c. 867, British Archaeological Reports (British Series) 641 (Oxford 2018), p. 92, where his source is also gossip, but hey…

6. For a realistic assessment of pilgrimage from England to the Holy Land in this period, see Peter Darby and Daniel Reynolds, “Reassessing the ‘Jerusalem Pilgrims’: the case of Bede’s De locis sanctis” in Bulletin for the Council for British Research in the Levant Vol. 9 (London 2014), pp. 27-31, DOI: 10.1179/1752726014Z.00000000022.

7. On which see Anna Gannon, “Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery” in Barrie Cook and Gareth Williams (edd.), Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c. AD 500–1250, The Northern World 19 (Leiden 2006), pp. 193–208.

Mistakes not to make

Teaching resumed on Monday, and who knows how long I can keep up blogging under one of my heavier loads so far in this post? But I have one post ready, which I put into draft in the beginning of April 2016, when I was clearing messages off an old phone. Some of the messages came from a period when I was marking exam scripts by first-year undergraduates completely new to medieval history—not at my current institution I should point out, but long in the past—and as anonymous to me then as they are to you now. I evidently had to share the pain with someone, and now it seems wrong not to disperse it more fully before they pass into oblivion. I mean, each one is a gem in its way. I have grouped them by their particular sort of failing. All spellings were authentic and hopefully still are. I hope I didn’t teach any of them and wish them all well in their current lives.

Sadly not really getting it

These are probably our fault as teachers, really, but we certainly had help.

“Christainity often faced mass persecution in early medieval era. In 64 AD the first account of Christain persecution took place as Christains were blamed for the Great Fire of Rome.”

“Without the Silk Roads, the development of the world may not have been so fast.”

Words that sound about right

“There is evidence of this available from primary sources such as Byzantium coins being found in areas of China during the Confucian dynasty…”

Yes, Confucian is what this smells of to me too.

Unhelpful caution

I don’t think these were our fault, though, I think these were students being afraid of us marking them wrong.

“The emergence of Christianity would have been a great change as many places had been pagan prior to their conversion.”

Almost all, really!

Of Muhammad:

“… arguably the most important prophet of Islam…”

It’s hard to think of one more so!

“It is possible that in the eighth century there was a different view on what was true.”

That is indeed a problem we face.

Not what you meant

Here, if anyone is to blame, it’s whoever taught the writers writing.

“Muslim women had a great hurdle in overcoming their participation in the intellectual and political institutions of Islam…”

Some of them, indeed, never managed it. And this one is my favourite of all.

“Buddhists were not large enough to cause mass conversions.”

No comment needed.

What do you mean?

“The advent of Muslim women’s success in overcoming their challenges was hindered at the advent of Prostitution and that it was widespread in Provincal cities that had monitered brothels.”

I understand most of where this came from, except how the Muslims got back to Provence so quietly, but I don’t understand where it was trying to go.

“With a long-lasting peak of 1600 years, the Silk Routes, or Silk Roads, are heavily attributed for their ability to connect the unknown world.”

Good to know. I think.

Over time, I have developed a reputation as a tough marker. I offer these, then, as partial explanation of how I might have got that way and ask for the ones that weren’t funny enough to quote also to be taken into consideration…