#WordenHoard

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Clues from the Past: #Romancoins

Thanks to @esmeefairbairn #collectionsfund and the #harrisfriends, we are able to better store, display and interpret coins in our collection through the #MoneyMatters project.

Here Money Matters Project Officer, curator Matt Ball, talks about some of the fascinating things we can discover from the Worden Hoard of Roman coins - a direct link between Lancashire and the complex economy of Roman Europe:

Not only were coins from the 260s and 70s AD produced in enormous numbers, but they are of a much lower quality than in previous decades. This shows that the mints were producing enormous numbers of coins in shorter spaces of time.

These coins are from the Worden Hoard, discovered in 1850 near Leyland, and on display in the Harris’ Discover Preston gallery.

 Left - the mark on this coin was caused by the mint worker failing to notice that another coin had become stuck in the coin mould.

 Right – a crudely-shaped coin, struck off-centre, from the 270s AD.

The rocketing numbers of coins being produced at the mints is directly linked to another factor: what they were made of. In the past, the primary Roman coins had been the denarius and the radiate – both silver, varying between upwards of 90% and 50% pure.

But then things changed. For many reasons, the amount of silver available to the Roman government went down. We know this because the radiate, a coin that had been introduced as a 50%/40% pure silver coin, was gradually debased. Over a period of about forty years from 240 AD, the silver mixture was diluted with so many base metals like bronze and copper that by 280 the radiate was barely 2% silver.

Above you can see what happened when the Roman government tried to stretch a dwindling amount of silver between ever greater numbers of coins. In the 240sAD the coins contained 40% silver but by the 280s AD they contained just 5% silver.  Despite this, there still lingered the expectation that a coin should at least look silver, so that’s exactly what the Roman mints did – they made these coppery, nasty coins look more silvery by cleverly disguising them. 

The above is from the Worden Hoard, and looks coppery. This is because it has lost its special silver coating. The coin below is an identical type, but has retained its silvery layer.

  So how did the Romans do it? The answer is ingenious. In the past, people thought the mint would just dunk the new coins in vats of molten silver, in a technique known as ‘silver wash’ – but that’s not true. Think about it: the Roman government didn’t have much silver for coins at its disposal anyway – why would it wastefully have vats of molten silver standing around the mint?

What really happened was much cleverer: the Romans knew that the coins contained at least some silver, so they sought to exploit that. They also knew a little about basic chemistry. It has recently been shown that new coins would have been dunked in an acid solution, which would dissolve all metals from a coin’s surface apart from silver. This would leave a silver-rich layer on the surface of the coin, which would then be impressed with a design. Clever, eh? Well, sort of – silver is a soft metal, so after a while in circulation, this silver enhanced layer would rub off, exposing the base metal beneath that the government was so keen to conceal.

This still didn’t hide the fact that the coinage was in a dire state – there were too many coins,  badly made, with too little silver. It got to a point when reform-minded emperors took one look at the currency and tried to sort things out. The emperors Aurelian and then Diocletian introduced major reforms of the coinage in the 270s and 290s respectively.

Below are some of Diocletian’s new coins – including a full silver coin, the argentus.

Very, very gradually, the shinier, nicer new coins issued by these emperors worked their way into circulation. At the same time, the old and scruffy radiates began to lose their purchasing power. You might not have been able to pay your taxes with them, and shopkeepers might have started to refuse them.

It is here that you begin to notice the connection between the Roman coin hoards of this period, and the old pre-decimal money used in Britain before 1971.

This might seem a strange connection to make - what possible similarity could there be between the old pennies, shillings, and threepenny bits stuffed away in tins and drawer about your house, and Roman coins?

There are plenty of stories of people in the late 1960s and early 70s who, either because they wanted to or because they passed the deadline for changing their money, keeping their old coins. These coins had lost all their purchasing power, but they kept them. Why?

Put yourself in the shoes of a Roman: you have a pot full of the old radiates - the ones you and your family have been used to for years - and they’ve now lost their value in the marketplace. What do you do? Well - by extrapolating from the number of uncovered coin radiate hoards found from this time - you bury them. Not because you want to one day retrieve them for use in the shops, but because ... well, who throws coins away? People didn’t in the 1970s; I don’t throw foreign coins away when I come back from holiday; and, it would seem, Romans of this period chose to bury their old coins for safekeeping. After all, one day they might have been of use once more. How were they to know they never would?"

Matt Ball

You can read more about the Money Matters project on these blog posts too: 

http://friendsoftheharris.tumblr.com/post/94421706494/money-matters-at-the-harris

http://friendsoftheharris.tumblr.com/post/96000576969/just-like-us-what-roman-coins-can-tell-us