be intended to represent a bird." But other coins that exist without names, or with names that cannot be deciphered, may be older than this. Besides the kings of the different states of the Heptarchy, and afterwards of all England, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York had mints and issued money in the Anglo-Saxon times. In addition to the name of the king or the archbishop, the coins usually contain that of the moneyer by whom they were struck, and from the time of Athelstan also that of the town where the mint was situated. The later kings appear to have usually had numerous moneyers, and mints in all the principal towns throughout the kingdom.[1]
Besides the coins of their own minting, several foreign coins appear to have circulated among the Anglo-Saxons, especially the byzantine gold solidi, commonly called byzantines, or byzants, each weighing seventy-three grains troy, and being of the value of forty Saxon pennies, or (at their estimation of the relative values of gold and silver) nine shillings and fourpence-halfpenny of our present money. Thus St. Dunstan is recorded to have purchased the estate of Hindon (now Hendon), in Middlesex, from King Edgar, for 200 gold byzantines, and then to have presented it to the monks of St. Peter in
- ↑ Complete lists of the moneyers and mints in each reign, as far as they can be recovered, are given in Ruding's elaborate and exact Annals of the Coinage, 2nd Edit. 5 vols. 8vo. and 1 4to. of Plates, Lond. 1819. On the subject of the Anglo-Saxon Coinage, the reader may also consult Bishop Fleetwood's Chronicon Preciosum, 2nd Edit. 8vo. Lond. 1745; the Introduction to Leake's Historical Account of English money from the Conquest, 2nd Edit. 8vo. Lond. 1745 (but the views of these earlier writers have been corrected in some important respects by the results of subsequent investigation): Pegge's Dissertations on some Anglo-Saxon Remains, 4to. Lond. 1756; Clarke's Connection of the Roman, Saxon, and English Coins, 4to. Lond. 1767 (both Pegge and Clarke endeavour to show that the Saxons coined gold); and Folkes's Tables of English Coins, published at the expense of the Society of Antiquaries, 4to. Lond. 1763 (in this work was announced the important discovery that the Saxon pound was the Old Tower or Cologne pound).
