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No detailed description available for \"Money Talks\".

No detailed description available for \"Money Talks\".

A further example of an Agnus Dei penny recently surfaced at a London auction.1 It was found in 2018 by a metal-detectorist, in south Lincolnshire. It is the twenty-second recorded example struck from Agnus Dei obverse and reverse dies, and takes the total of surviving specimens, including the two known mules with the Last Short Cross type, to twenty-four. The new coin is well preserved, without piercing, mounting or pecking, but is chipped between two and five o’clock. Both the mint, Leicester, and the moneyer, Æthelwig, are already known for the Agnus Dei type;2 it is in fact a die-duplicate of the other known coin of Æthelwig.3 The new coin brings the number of known examples for Leicester to four, and adds a second example for the moneyer. Allowing for the chip, the weight of 1.46g is consistent with the c. 1.75g noted for more complete examples.

Metal detecting in England has recovered a large number of Viking Age single finds that have been reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme. These reveal that silver bullion of Scandinavian origin was used as currency throughout the Danelaw between AD 865 and 940. Standardised weights of copper alloy were an integral part of this metal-weight economy. Bullion was not the sole means of silver payment during this period: coinage had long been used in the occupied Anglo-Saxon territories and continued to be minted under the Vikings. The resulting dual-currency economy may have facilitated trade with neighbouring Scandinavian territories, but the two currencies also served as markers of cultural identity, offering a choice of monetary media.

The rise of the Minster Hypothesis, put forward by John Blair (2005) and others (e.g. Foot 2006; Tinti 2005) has led to archaeological research focusing on the impact of the monasteries as institutions in the provision of pastoral care and as centres of economic centrality during Anglo-Saxon England. Although this model has contributed to the increasing archaeological investigations at Middle Saxon sites across Mercia, it undermines the importance of the individual bishops during this period, and has led to some academics calling out for a reassessment of the role of the bishops in the early English Church (e.g. Coates 1996). The following research, therefore, aims to highlight how the evidence can be used to explore bishops in Anglo-Saxon society, especially in regards to the geographical distributions of power and the archaeological manifestations of trade. In order to explore these themes, the following paper will have a mixed methodology of archaeological and documentary evidence and will focus on the region of Greater Mercia between the period of AD700-950.

In the years 1741–3, two scholars of Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, one an Englishman and the other a Swede, were engaged in correspondence. The Englishman was the Reverend Edward Lye (1694–1767), then rector of Yardley Hastings in Northamptonshire, and the Swede was Eric Benzelius the Younger (1675–1743), bishop of Linköping and, in the last year of his life, archbishop-elect of Uppsala. For many years Benzelius had been preparing an edition of the ‘Codex Argenteus’ of the Gothic gospels, which had been in Uppsala University Library since 1669, but he had been unable to complete the work on account of his many other commitments and also through the lack of suitable publishers for such a volume in Sweden. In his frustration, he sought the help of his many highly-placed friends in England, who included Sir Hans Sloane and John Carteret, first Earl Granville, a former Ambassador to Sweden. They directed him to Edward Lye as the only man in England competent to complete the edition, and the University Press at Oxford, as the only publisher able to handle the diffcult commission, as it still possessed Junius's type fonts for printing Gothic, Old English and runic characters.