Medieval Money Mystery Solved

[John Conduitt]

47 minutes ago, Rand said:

I am afraid this was information that I got. I did not ask questions myself. 
There was a specific comment on the sudden use of Byzantine silver, which could be due to the changes in economic relationships, now involving smaller agricultural landowners and other increases in trade, which needed silver rather than gold coinage, and it became profitable to melt chunky silver items. There was a comment about a large amount of stored Byzantine silver items when several big silver plates could provide silver for c. 10,000 coins. The sudden trend of melting Byzantine silver may explain why many coins were produced from Byzantine rather than mixed silver. This does not explain what happened with recycled Roman silver. The overall numbers of the produced coins were estimated as very large, but not in millions as was mentioned on our thread (I am no expert in these coins to have a strong personal opinion).

Yes that was me with the millions estimate. If one die can strike 10,000 coins - a conservative estimate, it appears - and Series E alone has at least 40 varieties (in Sceatta List), you have 400,000 coins if there was only one die pair per variety. Many of these varieties are very common. So we are well into the millions on one Series. There are Series A-Z.

Edited April 20 by John Conduitt

[Hrefn]

Has any significant amount of Byzantine or East Roman silver dated post 410 AD ever been found in the British Isles?  Or any hexagrams?   I know there were some bowls of Byzantine manufacture in the Sutton Hoo burial.  But if the gold tremissis was replaced by the silver sceat or penny circa AD 660, and the new coins were from made from new Byzantine silver, shouldn’t we see more of this Byzantine feedstock?  

We know for a fact that there were some enormous collections of silver tableware left behind when the province was abandoned by Rome, because some of them have survived to the present.  This would suggest old (pre-410) Roman silver as the most probable source of the sceat coinage.  If scientific studies are suggesting these coins were made of silver more recently acquired from Byzantium, it should be possible to point to some ingots, hexagrams, or plate from the sixth or seventh century in England which would suggest a sufficient influx of Byzantine bullion to support a coinage, as well as address the question of why Byzantium would send such to an area lost to the empire for nearly two centuries by this time.  

My impression is that there isn’t much early Byzantine silver in Britain, and little historic rationale to expect there would be.  Unless we postulate that it was all melted into sceats, but I find that improbable.  

 

Edited April 21 by Hrefn
Date

[John Conduitt]

11 hours ago, Hrefn said:

Has any significant amount of Byzantine or East Roman silver dated post 410 AD ever been found in the British Isles?  Or any hexagrams?   I know there were some bowls of Byzantine manufacture in the Sutton Hoo burial.  But if the gold tremissis was replaced by the silver sceat or penny circa AD 660, and the new coins were from made from new Byzantine silver, shouldn’t we see more of this Byzantine feedstock?  

We know for a fact that there were some enormous collections of silver tableware left behind when the province was abandoned by Rome, because some of them have survived to the present.  This would suggest old (pre-410) Roman silver as the most probable source of the sceat coinage.  If scientific studies are suggesting these coins were made of silver more recently acquired from Byzantium, it should be possible to point to some ingots, hexagrams, or plate from the sixth or seventh century in England which would suggest a sufficient influx of Byzantine bullion to support a coinage, as well as address the question of why Byzantium would send such to an area lost to the empire for nearly two centuries by this time.  

My impression is that there isn’t much early Byzantine silver in Britain, and little historic rationale to expect there would be.  Unless we postulate that it was all melted into sceats, but I find that improbable.  

If you search the Portable Antiquities Scheme for Byzantine era finds, you get 121, almost all copper alloy coins with a few gold coins and base silver trachys. There was trade between Byzantium and the western (non-Saxon) parts of Britain immediately after the Romans left but less so with the Saxons themselves and it wasn't delivering vast amounts of plate. The silver from the entire Sutton Hoo find would have only produced 10,000 sceattas out of the millions made, and that was a unique find.

I suspect that if the explosion of silver Saxon coins after 670 has anything to do with the Byzantines it is their access to silver mines, not the Saxons using old Byzantine silver plate. This paper shows there were very productive silver mines at the edges of the Byzantine Empire, in Armenia and the Balkans. But after the fall of the Western Empire their output was affected by attack and invasion. In 387 the Persians took eastern Armenia, where all the silver mines were (the Sasanians struck plenty of silver coins - the wars with Byzantium were often over the mines). The Western Empire was still going at that point and now relied heavily on British mines, which it lost in 400, stopping silver production there. Then in the 6th century the Goths attacked the Balkans, hampering production there. The Byzantines still mined silver but the output was much reduced.

The Sasanians were overthrown by the Muslims in 651 and although they retained eastern Armenia, it operated autonomously. The Byzantines (who had western Armenia) could have made use of the output of the Armenian silver mines at that point, as could the Saxons. And the new autonomy of Armenia in 651 ties in rather nicely with a new supply of silver for sceattas in the decades afterwards.

The question then isn't just where the Saxons got their silver, but where the Byzantines got theirs. There are only three options. Either the silver was recycled, or it was fresh from a mine, or a bit of both. The new research found:
"A very clear chemical and isotopic signature matching 3rd to early 7th century silver from the Byzantine Empire in the eastern Mediterranean. The silver was homogenous across the coins and characterized by high gold values (0.6–2%) and a consistent isotopic range, with no distinguishable regional variations among them. No known European ore source matches the elemental and isotopic characteristics of these early silver coins. Nor is there any meaningful overlap with late Western Roman silver coins or other objects. These coins did not recycle late Roman silver."

So, we can say it isn't directly from Roman plate or coins. We can also say it was homogenous. And it was like the silver found in Byzantine objects, which apparently remained the same from the fall of the Western Empire to the minting of sceattas in the 700s.

Their claim is that this must mean it was from silver taken from Byzantium decades or centuries earlier and later melted down. This would give you silver that isn't directly from Roman silver, is homogenous and is like Byzantine silver. But you then have this improbable scenario where the Saxons had vast amounts of Byzantine silver that they sat on. Not only that, they had to care deeply about where the silver came from and when to melt it down. First, they melted all the old Roman silver, the supply of which ended in 400. They used this in ingots, hacksilver and plate for a couple of hundred years. But they left their Byzantine silver well alone, which they stored separately. That could not mix with the Roman stuff. Only in 670 or later did they melt the Byzantine, when the rich suddenly wanted to liquidate their precious Byzantine assets for unspecified reasons. They did not mix this with the silver they'd made from old Roman sources in any way, which they presumably discarded. They also had a steady supply of Byzantine plate until Charlemagne arrived in the 760s. This is nonsensical, especially as at the time the distinction between Roman and Byzantine didn't exist.

The researchers say that they "hope to establish how and why so much silver moved from the Byzantine Empire into Western Europe." They suspect "a mixture of trade, diplomatic payments and Anglo-Saxon mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army. The new findings also raise tantalizing questions about how and where silver was stored and why its owners suddenly decided to turn it into coins."

But you don't need to give yourself that headache. There is another possibility, which seems more obvious. At this time, both Byzantium and the Saxons had the same silver sources. These sources could include old Roman silver, old Byzantine silver, new Byzantine silver, old Persian silver, new Arabic silver, re-recycled Saxon silver and silver from the mines in Armenia and the Balkans. The one thing it didn't include, for either of them, was fresh silver from Western European mines, which gave the different signature to Roman and Carolingian silver. All this silver was exchanged, melted down and reused across Europe, from Britain to Byzantium.

The reason it isn't like old Roman silver is because production of that ended in 400 and it had already been melted down and mixed with all this other silver in the 300 years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the start of sceatta production. The reason it is homogenous is because they kept reusing and recycling it and mixing all these same types together (as proven by the presence of gold from melting plated objects down), with no fresh input from Western European mines (which defined Roman and Carolingian silver). The reason it was like Byzantine silver was because Byzantine silver was also made from all the above. The silver from the Armenian and Balkan mines would have been present the whole time, so any increase would not notice as much as a new source of silver (as from France).

Edited April 21 by John Conduitt

[Hrefn]

 @John Conduitt, I like your explanation.  I think the researchers may not appreciate the degree to which silver objects are serially manufactured, pooled, melted, recycled, and manufactured again over time.  I recall the great silver melt of 1979 when the Hunt brothers cornered the silver market and sent prices to $50/oz.  I personally saw everything from Tiffany tea sets, to Georgian platters, Chinese silver jewelry, Mexican coins, and Danish silverware get scrapped.  A few centuries of that sort of behavior and the circulating silver supply would achieve a good degree of homogeneity.  

So the sceats represent the common European silver pool as it was circa 650 AD, continually refreshed by the influx of eastern mine output.   In other words, the same material as was available to the early Byzantines.  

I agree this is a much more plausible explanation than massive and mysterious importation of Byzantine plate into England, or hordes of Saxon sell-swords working in the Byzantine army and remitting their silver pay back to the wife and kids in Kent and Mercia.  

[Grimulfr]

This is an interesting debate and I confess to not properly understanding the role of lead isotopes in the analysis - would the lead not have been sourced separately to the silver? - which clearly serves to confirm my lack of scientific understanding!  The research was widely covered in the UK press and orginates from an article in Antiquity (open access here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/byzantine-plate-and-frankish-mines-the-provenance-of-silver-in-northwest-european-coinage-during-the-long-eighth-century-c-660820/EE2DE1D7955D055FA4225257755BF340) but the following abstract gives a clearer summary of the study: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3fba9aa7-163b-49f0-b883-d14c74a323c4/files/rp8418n97k.   Obviously there was a lot of Byzantine silver plate, spoons et al in the Sutton Hoo burial (which tends to dominate public narratives around Anglo-Saxons in the UK!) and I think that there were similar treasures in the Prittlewell Hoard. I agree with @John Conduitt that in many respects, the analysis raises more questions than it answers - what would explain a large import/ stocks of Byzantine silver in the preceding period to fuel the mintage of the sceatta coinage?  Could ecclesiastical plate from the Eastern empire really have provided such a large volume of silver given that Christianity had only been recently re-introduced to Britain?  What happened to existing silver (including Western Roman silver) that may have been in circulation/ re-circulation?  I don't have any suggestions but I am enjoying the questions it raises and the focus it places on early medieval coinage of nothern Europe. 

[John Conduitt]

8 minutes ago, Grimulfr said:

This is an interesting debate and I confess to not properly understanding the role of lead isotopes in the analysis - would the lead not have been sourced separately to the silver? - which clearly serves to confirm my lack of scientific understanding!  The research was widely covered in the UK press and orginates from an article in Antiquity (open access here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/byzantine-plate-and-frankish-mines-the-provenance-of-silver-in-northwest-european-coinage-during-the-long-eighth-century-c-660820/EE2DE1D7955D055FA4225257755BF340) but the following abstract gives a clearer summary of the study: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:3fba9aa7-163b-49f0-b883-d14c74a323c4/files/rp8418n97k.   Obviously there was a lot of Byzantine silver plate, spoons et al in the Sutton Hoo burial (which tends to dominate public narratives around Anglo-Saxons in the UK!) and I think that there were similar treasures in the Prittlewell Hoard. I agree with @John Conduitt that in many respects, the analysis raises more questions than it answers - what would explain a large import/ stocks of Byzantine silver in the preceding period to fuel the mintage of the sceatta coinage?  Could ecclesiastical plate from the Eastern empire really have provided such a large volume of silver given that Christianity had only been recently re-introduced to Britain?  What happened to existing silver (including Western Roman silver) that may have been in circulation/ re-circulation?  I don't have any suggestions but I am enjoying the questions it raises and the focus it places on early medieval coinage of nothern Europe. 

Thanks for this.

The lead isotope analysis is to help distinguish between sources of silver. Lead is often found in silver deposits and presumably the Melle mine had a lot of a particular isotope so that you could tell the silver came from there. This was how they were able to say the Melle mine opened after 750 i.e. by Charlemagne. But as they say, the refining process both uses lead and removes lead, and recycling metal would give you different results again. Charlamagne's use of the Melle mine, however, seems to be attested in the contemporary records and not really in doubt anyway.

Ironically, the authors are happy to say the Byzantine silver was then recycled and mixed with the newly mined silver, even though these two silvers do not match in their analysis any more than they did with old Roman silver. The Roman silver, however, simply disappeared...

They also say Series A and B sceattas have a different isotope profile. These are the early English sceattas. Perhaps more of the old Roman silver was used in those...

 

[JeandAcre]

Many thanks, @John Conduitt, for translating the crux of this for the benefit of the scientifically illiterate.  And thanks to @Grimulfr for the Fantastic link!!!  Summarily bookmarked --this is going to be fun!

[Anaximander]

The result of the study, if I'm not mistaken, is that we now have an answer to a longstanding question on where the silver originated that was behind an explosion of silver penny -and presumably denier- production in Western Europe before 750 B.C.  It is ironic that we come up with more questions than answers!  Like @Rand, I'm comfortable with the finding that Byzantine silver was used in the production of silver pennies; there's a notion that such silver was previously hoarded in Europe and, with the right motivation, there followed a melting of that silver hoard and minting of coinage.  

The article in Antiquities and others that report on that Oxford-Cambridge-Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam study is worthwhile reading. I'll toss this out for further review: 
(1) Listen to the podcast featuring one of the co-authors, Cambridge professor Rory Naismith (discussed here by @Broucheion).
(2) To get into the broader perspective, it is tempting to pick up Naismith's new book, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages (available at Amazon), mentioned in the podcast. 

 
To be clear, the topic of Byzantine silver does come up in the podcast (and seemingly in the book), but the discussion here by @John Conduitt, @Rand,  @Hrefn , @ela126, @JeandAcre and @DLTcoins does more justice to the topic than the podcast, where the term "isotope" isn't mentioned. The podcast did dwell a bit heavy on clipping, false money, and the potential loss of "appendages" by offending moneyers (shudder!).

Edited May 11 by Anaximander
P.S. Repeat after me: "I will not issue false money."