Around the year 1000, silver pennies were struck in 68 English towns, each coin naming its moneyer and its mint. Were the towns that made England's money still the important towns in 1377, in 1801, and today?
Lydford, on the western edge of Dartmoor in Devon, is a village today: 370 people live in its parish. A thousand years ago it was a mint town. Its surviving coins name nine different moneyers between the reigns of Æthelred II and Edward the Confessor, 103 of its pennies are in the database I used, and Domesday Book counts 28 burgesses there in 1086. Then the coins stop, and the town never grew.
Late Anglo-Saxon England had a remarkably organised coinage. After King Edgar's reform, around 973, every penny named the king, the moneyer who struck it and the town where it was struck, and the design was changed every few years. Because each coin names its town, the coins are a census of sorts: a list of the places that mattered enough to have a mint. So they make a natural "before" picture for a question I keep coming back to on this blog. Does a place's importance last?
To answer it I gathered 70,995 coin records from the Fitzwilliam Museum's database of early medieval coins, kept 33,609 from the English and Welsh mints between Edgar's reform and the death of Stephen in 1154 whose mint is certain, and followed each mint town forward to 1377, 1801 and 2021. The short answer: the great mints mostly stayed great, the tiny ones mostly stayed tiny, and the cities of the Industrial Revolution never struck a coin in this period.
Each gold disc is a mint with surviving coins from the chosen reign, sized by the number of different moneyers named on them, the usual measure of how much a mint struck. Drag the slider through the twelve reigns from Edgar's reform to Stephen. Tap a mint to see its moneyers in every reign, how big it was in 1377, 1801 and 2021, and where its coins were found.
Edgar's reform coins survive from 29 mints in this database, from only 143 coins of a type struck for about two years. Under Æthelred II the number jumps to 68, and it peaks under Cnut at 71, with 70 under Edward the Confessor. After the Conquest the network shrinks a little, to 63 under William I and 59 under Henry I, before the troubled reign of Stephen brings the count back up to 66, with mints that appear for the first time, such as Castle Rising, Dunwich, Cardiff and Newcastle.
These are counts of mints with surviving coins, so they are a floor, not a census. Harold II reigned for nine months in 1066, and the database has his coins from 43 mints; Wikipedia's history of the English penny gives 48. The same article puts the total at around 70 places in England and Wales over the whole period; in the database I count 106 that I could name with certainty in at least one reign, many of them active only briefly.
Mints were wildly unequal. Under Æthelred II, the reign that straddles the year 1000, London coins name 105 different moneyers, York 69 and Lincoln 68. Those three alone account for 28% of all the moneyers recorded in that reign across 68 mints, while seven mints have a single named moneyer or none. Winchester, the old West Saxon royal centre, is fourth with 47, and Stamford fifth with 40.
Moneyer counts are the standard rough measure of a mint's output, but they are not the same thing as coins struck, and they depend on how many coins happen to survive and be catalogued. Æthelred's and Cnut's pennies are by far the most numerous in the collections (8,605 and 8,742 records), so those reigns are especially well represented.
The museum database mixes two kinds of record. Most (55,164) are coins in museum collections, many of them from hoards; a minority (15,831) are single finds, coins lost one at a time and recorded with a findspot. Single finds are the better guide to everyday circulation, so for this question I used only them. Of the 3,876 single finds from certain English and Welsh mints in my period, I could place 2,894 (75%) at a findspot on the Ordnance Survey's map.
The median coin was found 88.5 km from its mint. Only 18% were found within 25 km, and 45% more than 100 km away. So money moved. But it did not move at random. If every coin in a purse were a random draw from the national output, the median distance would be about 163 km. And 20% of single finds come from the nearest mint that was working at the time, 6.2 times the 3.2% expected if coins mixed freely across the country.
Coins travelled, but a penny was still most likely to be lost near the town that struck it.
The pattern is much the same before and after 1066 (median 88 km under the Anglo-Saxon kings and 89 km under the Normans). Of the four biggest mints, London's coins spread widest: only 14% of London single finds lie within 50 km of the city, and their median distance is 110 km. At the other end, East Anglian mints such as Thetford and Norwich have many finds close to home, which may partly reflect how many finds are reported from Norfolk and Suffolk.
Now the long view. For each mint town I looked up its place in three later rankings, all from Wikipedia's list of English towns by historical population: the 1377 poll tax (the 41 largest towns), the first census in 1801 (the 30 largest), and its Census 2021 population, which I computed myself from ONS small-area data for the built-up area of the same name.
The top of the table is remarkably stable. Eight of the ten biggest mints of around 1000 were still among the largest towns of England in 1377. London was first in every era. York was second in 1377. Norwich was sixth in 1377 and eighth in 1801. Across all 67 mint towns of Æthelred's reign with a 2021 population, the rank correlation between moneyers then and residents now is 0.44 (Spearman, p < 0.001); against the 1377 list it is 0.45.
The 1801 census tells a different story. By then only five of the ten were in the top 30, and the correlation with the old mint ranking falls to 0.23 (p = 0.064). The Industrial Revolution had arrived. Of the 30 largest towns in 1801, only 12 had ever struck coins in my period. None of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds or Sheffield had a mint in this period. Today the picture is the same: of England's 30 largest built-up areas, 11 were mint towns.
The winners and losers are the interesting part. Winchester, fourth among the mints, had slipped to 30th in 1377 and is a city of 49,967 today. Stamford, fifth, was 32nd in 1377 and has 20,751 people now. Thetford, seventh, with 1,665 burgesses in Domesday, is missing from the 1377 list altogether and has 25,256 residents. Wallingford, twelfth, had 18 moneyers and today has 8,456 people. Bristol went the other way: one moneyer in Æthelred's reign, third largest town in 1377, fifth in 1801.
29 mint towns have fewer than 5,000 people today (or no people at all). Some were once substantial:
Some look like the "emergency" mints that, according to Wikipedia's history of the English penny, were set up under Æthelred II because of Viking raids. Cadbury's coins were struck at the hillfort of Cadbury Castle, beside a village parish of 326 people today; Cissbury is Cissbury Ring on the South Downs, where no one lives at all. Others were ordinary towns that lost out. Dunwich in Suffolk, a Stephen-era mint that Russell's estimate puts at 1,596 people in 1086, has a parish of 116 today. Torksey, on the Trent, had 264 burgesses in Domesday; its parish now has 777 residents. Wilton, in Wiltshire, had 25 moneyers before 1066 and a built-up area of 3,515 now. Bedwyn struck coins for Edward the Confessor only, from eight surviving records; Great Bedwyn has 1,790 residents. And Horndon on the Hill in Essex is known as a mint from a single coin, which is not in this database at all.
The reverse journey is rarer. Only four mint towns that never had more than three moneyers in any reign have grown past 100,000:
All four were late or marginal mints: Reading and Peterborough appear with two coins and one coin, Newcastle and Swansea only in the troubled reign of Stephen. The great industrial cities did not grow out of the Anglo-Saxon mint network. They grew beside it.
Do the old mint towns still have money? A little. Average household income (ONS, financial year ending 2023) is slightly higher in the towns that had ten or more moneyers before 1066 (median £54,095) than in those with two or fewer (£51,235), against an English median of £53,636 per small area. The rank correlation between moneyers and income is 0.26. That is weak, and it mostly says that big old towns now include places like London, Winchester, Oxford and Cambridge.
The database is not a full census of coins. It holds what has been catalogued: coins in museum collections (SCBI), many of them from hoards, and single finds reported to the EMC. Reigns and mints that happen to be well represented in collections look bigger. Counts of mints and moneyers are floors.
Mint names need care. I counted only records whose mint is a single named place in England or Wales. 2,428 records in my period have no mint, 331 have a queried mint ("York?"), 44 offer two or more possibilities ("Bath or Barnstaple", "Southwark or Sudbury"), and 20 are copies or imitations. These are all left out and listed in the data. In total 92% of records from the period are used. Duplicates returned by more than one mint search (764) were removed by their EMC/SCBI number. I tell EMC from SCBI records by the pattern of the record number, which the presence of findspots supports.
Places are approximate. Mints are placed at today's town or village of the same name; a few need a judgement (Cadbury at South Cadbury, Bedwyn at Great Bedwyn, Salisbury at modern Salisbury rather than Old Sarum), and Newport is left unplaced. Findspots were matched only where the name is unique in Britain, or where it is the only city or town of that name, and "near" findspots are placed at the named place.
Later sizes are rough. The 1377 and 1801 rankings cover only the largest towns, so a town absent from them is "smaller than the list", not zero. Census 2021 populations of built-up areas are summed from small areas by best fit, which is crude for villages. Domesday burgess counts are taken from the parsed entries in my Domesday Destiny study and are missing for many county towns, whose boroughs Domesday describes separately.
Coins. I searched the Fitzwilliam Museum's public EMC/SCBI database by each of its 353 mint values, which returned 71,759 rows and 70,995 unique records. Reigns come from the ruler field: Edgar's reform type only, then every king from Edward the Martyr to Stephen (Scottish and Northumbrian namesakes removed). A mint's size in a reign is the number of distinct moneyer names on its coins. I publish only counts by mint and reign, and record numbers with links, not the catalogue's descriptions.
Places. Mints and findspots are matched to OS Open Names; each mint is cross-checked against Wikidata settlements. Distances are straight lines. The nearest-mint test compares the share of finds struck by the nearest working mint with the share expected if each find were a random draw from that reign's national output, weighted by moneyers.
Destiny. 1086, 1377 and 1801 figures from Wikipedia's List of towns and cities in England by historical population (Russell's 1086 estimates, the 1377 poll tax, the 1801 census). Census 2021 populations from ONS small areas summed to 2022 built-up areas; incomes from the ONS small-area income estimates for the financial year ending 2023. Rank correlations are Spearman's.