WEien Julius Caesar publisEied a brief account of what he observed and accomplished during his invasions of Britain in 55 and 54 BC, one of the first things he mentioned in a general description of the island and its inhabitants was that ‘they use either bronze or gold coinage, or else iron bars of definite weight instead of coins’ {De Bello Galileo v.12.4).
A Roman military commander attempting to justify a dangerous and speculative war of foreign conquest to an educated Roman audience had, perhaps, a natural preoccupation with money and supplies, and this observation was in fact part of a short list of the most important resources of Britain as he perceived them: a vast population, multitudes of livestock, gold and bronze coinage, and ores of tin and iron. But as the geographer Strabo remarked a couple of generations later {Geography iv.5.3), Caesar did not in fact achieve very much, although he brought back ‘hostages, slaves, and quantities of other booty’. In Strabo’s time, early in the first century AD, the Romans were finding it more profitable to trade with the island and tax the traffic than to try to conquer and administer warlike and politically labile tribesmen; it was not until the 40s AD that conquest became both feasible and attractive, with the growth of several large and relatively stable kingdoms in southern Britain after a century of lively contact with the Roman provinces of Gaul.
The history of Celtic coinage is intimately connected with the evolving relationship between Celtic Europe and the Mediterranean between the fourth century BC and the mid-first century AD, and the geographical location of the most influential centres of Celtic coinage production tended to move outwards from the margins of the Mediterranean world with the passage of time.
Britain was in fact the last major region of ancient Celtic Europe to adopt coinage, and the earliest British coins were indeed of gold and a tin-rich bronze alloy, in line with Caesar’s description. The cast bronze (potin) coins in fact came first, in the later second century BC, followed by the earliest gold between c.8o and 60 BC (Haselgrove 1993). At the time of Caesar’s invasions, however, British coinage was still at an early stage in its development, and its expansion into one of the most intricate and potentially informative of all Celtic coinage systems took place during the following century when the Roman conquest of Gaul had temporarily brought the northwestern frontier of the Roman Empire to the Channel coastline. On the Continent,
Celtic coinage began much earlier, during the third century BC in places, and by the early second century was in existence over an enormous geographical area, from Picardy, southern Germany, Bohemia and Transylvania in the north, to Languedoc, Provence, northern Italy, Hungary, Austria and Bulgaria in the south.
Although a few overall regularities can be observed in the pattern of adoption and development of Celtic coinage in many different areas, coinage was not in reality a single, uniform phenomenon subject to the same interpretation in widely separated times and places. Instead, it was one among many expressions of the social and economic priorities of the elites who issued it, and the interpretation of any given coinage inevitably depends upon some understanding of the particular cultural context within which it was used. For this reason, Celtic coinage should always be studied in the context of the general archaeological record of its times.
Almost without exception, the earliest coinages in each region were of silver and gold, and of relatively large denominations. Such coinage was treasure, and as such belonged to the sphere of elite circulation: official payments, taxes, tribute, and fines, religious offerings, dowries, and other customary payments. The alloy, weight and designs of gold and silver coinage were always carefully adjusted and controlled.
By contrast, small change, whether in the form of very small silver coins, sometimes weighing a mere fraction of a gramme, or low-value copper and bronze coins, generally made its first appearance rather late in any given region’s history of coinage use. Early British potin (cast bronze) coinage is only an apparent exception to this rule, as the way it was used suggests that, despite its appearance, it was treated as a valuable material, with a special and essentially restricted range of uses (Haselgrove forthcoming). Small change proper seems generally to have been used for a much wider range of transactions than the larger denominations of silver and all gold coinage, and probably by a much larger number of people. It tends, for instance, to be found amidst general settlement debris, suggesting use in the course of everyday life on nucleated settlements (cf. Kraay 1964).
Rare glimpses by Mediterranean observers of Celtic societies before and around the time at which they first began to strike coinage of their own afford valuable insight into the social environment within which the earliest Celtic coinages were used.
The second-century BC historian of Roman affairs, Polybius, describing some of the early Celtic immigrants to northern Italy, long before the introduction of coinage, said.
Their possessions consisted of cattle and gold, because these were the only things they could carry about with them everywhere according to circumstances and shift wherever they chose. They treated comradeship as of the greatest importance, those among them being the most feared and most powerful who were thought to have the largest number of attendants and associates.
{Histories II.17)
A later observer, Poseidonios, writing in around 80 BC, described how in the mid-second century BC, King Louernios of the Arverni in central Gaul, ‘in an attempt to win popular favour, rode in a chariot over the plains distributing gold and silver to the tens of thousands of Celts who followed him’, and in addition laid on a lavish feast to entertain all comers that lasted for many days on end (in Athenaeus, Deipnosphists iv.37).
Although largesse could be distributed in many different ways, coinage was a particularly convenient medium for making relatively small but conspicuous gifts or payments to large numbers of people. Something like the social organization that Polybius’s sources or Poseidonios himself observed was probably universal in early Celtic societies. Powerful nobles needed to attract and entertain personal retinues, dependants, craftsmen and poets (Poseidonios also mentioned that a poet turned up late to the feast, but flattered his way into a bag of gold all the same), foreign guests, and armies of warriors. It was within a world such as this that coinage was integrated during the third and early second centuries BC into many communities throughout Celtic Europe.
But striking coinage was an expensive way to maintain dependants, make gifts, and pay armies. Gold and silver coinage consisted of actual pieces of treasure, and at the rate of, for instance, 7 grammes of gold per early Celtic alloyed stater and perhaps 5 staters per soldier per season, 1,000 men would cost 35 kg of gold, a lot by any standards. Their leaders would of course cost more. This is not an entirely fanciful calculation, as we do have a little evidence for relevant rates of pay (cf. Nash 1987; 14 ff.). The Macedonian stater contained over 8.50 grammes of pure gold, and King Perseus of Macedon (179-168 BC) is known to have hired a large contingent of Danubian Celtic Bastarnae for a season’s campaign at a rate of 5 gold staters apiece for infantry warriors, 10 each for the cavalry, and 1,000 for their king Claodicus (Livy, History of Rome XLIV.26).
Enormous quantities of Mediterranean gold passed into Celtic Europe in the hands of returning warriors during the fourth and third centuries BC as the rulers of the Hellenistic Mediterranean spent their resources on wars of conquest, competition and defence. The Celts were the most popular barbarian soldiers of the day (Griffith 1935), having earned a reputation with the Greeks for being almost insanely courageous, prepared to fight even the ocean waves, and alleging no fear of death. The Celts, particularly those of central and western Europe, preferred their salaries in gold at a time when silver was the normal currency medium in the Mediterranean sphere, and colossal amounts of Hellenistic gold coinage were struck to meet their demands.
It Is therefore no surprise to find that it was coinages struck by the main Mediterranean employers of barbarian mercenary soldiers that inspired the types of the earliest native coinages of Celtic Europe (Table 14.1). There is in fact reason to think that some Celtic groups travelled enormous distances to participate In Mediterranean wars. In third-century Picardy, far remote from southern Italy, successive coinages of Tarentum were copied with such accuracy, and in the correct order, that It Is difficult to escape the conclusion that these Celts were in direct contact over a relatively long period with some source of Tarentine coinage (Scheers 1968, 1981). It is difficult to make out a convincing case for coinage having played any important part in trading relations between the Mediterranean world and northern Europe at that period, and even more difficult to account for such apparently consistent trading contact between Tarentum and Picardy in particular. But coinage was the unique and universal medium of payment for mercenary soldiers, whom the Tarentines, among many others, did employ. It is tempting to see in the
Table 14.1 Principal Mediterranean prototypes for Celtic coinage
Model
Where copied
1 Third-early second century BC Switzerland gold Rhineland gold
Central Gaul gold Romania/Danube Basin silver
Central Europe gold Danube Basin silver Northern Italy silver Languedoc/Aquitaine silver Rhone valley/Alps silver Bulgaria silver Picardy gold Normandy gold Languedoc silver Languedoc/Aquitaine silver
2 Mid-late second century BC Noricum silver
Rhone valley silver
J First century BC
Britain, all metals (after c.20 bc)
Philip II of Macedon (359-336 Bc) gold staters (+ posthumous types until 3rd century bc)
Philip II lifetime + posthumous silver tetradrachms
Alexander III (356-32 BC) gold staters Alexander III silver tetradrachms Massalia 4th-century BC silver drachmae
Massalla 4th-century BC silver obols Philip III (323-316 BC) silver tetradrachms Tarentum (c.334-272 BC) gold and silver Syracuse (Agathokles: 317-289 BC) gold Rhodes 3rd-century BC silver drachmae Emporion silver drachmae (c.246-218 BC)
Roman Republican denarii (after c.150 BC)
Roman Republican silver
History of the first coinages of north-western France early evidence for the martial prowess of the ancestors of the Belgae whom Julius Caesar was much later to encounter as formidable, almost invincible, opponents.
Celtic warriors did not enter mercenary service only for pay, but for the sake of any booty to be won and for the prestige that would accrue to success. They not only served for Mediterranean employers during the century of continuous warfare that culminated in the wars between Carthage and Rome of 264-241 and 218-201 BC, but also for one another. Roman conquests in the Mediterranean sphere provoked not only the Greeks and Garthage, but also the Gisalpine Gelts to hire transalpine mercenaries.
The two largest tribes [of Gisalpine Gaul], the Insubres and Boii, made a league and sent messengers to the Gauls dwelling among the Alps and near the Rhone, who are called Gaesatae because they serve for hire. . .. They urged and incited their kings... to make war on Rome, offering them an immediate large sum in gold, and for the future pointing out the great prosperity of the Romans, and the vast wealth that would be theirs if they were victorious. They had no difficulty in persuading them.. .
{Polybius, Histories Il. zzff.)
The leaders of the Gaesatae collected a richly equipped and formidable force which descended into the Po valley in 225 BC for what turned out to be an ill-fated expedition.
The Cisalpine Celts had no gold coinage of their own, so if they paid the Gaesatae their advance in coin, it can only have been in that of other communities, especially the ubiquitous Macedonian currency struck in the name of Philip II long after his death, but popular with foreign mercenary soldiers. It was in fact posthumous types of Philip II gold staters that furnished the prototypes for nearly all the most influential early coinages in the Gallic sphere, including the Alps, Rhineland and central Gaul, areas from which Polybius’s ‘Gaesatae’ (whose name actually only means ‘spearsmen’) were recruited (Nash 1987: 84 ff.).
Celtic coinage therefore originated during the third century BC, in a period of intensified military contact with the rulers of Macedon, Tarentum, Rhode and Carthage as the latter fought losing struggles with Rome, and Syracuse, Massalia and probably Emporion as they supplied military and naval assistance to their Roman allies. This was followed by a new epoch in economic relations with the Mediterranean world, since Rome did not employ mercenary soldiers, but had an enormous and growing need for trade goods from Celtic Europe - above all, slaves and metals. This would not in itself have led to the adoption of coinage in Celtic Europe, but its impact upon a Celtic world that was already integrating coinage into its social functioning for other reasons did give an enormous spur to further development.
We have good documentary evidence from contemporary observers that the Celts’ eagerness to import wine was at least as great as their greed for gold, and that in Gaul during the second and first centuries BC, the slaves that the Romans needed in ever increasing numbers were being purchased from Celts with amphorae of wine by Mediterranean merchants based at Narbonne and other cities in southern Gaul (Diodorus Siculus, World History V.26).
In the Danube Basin, where the Celts had for centuries mingled with other native communities, and had by the early first century BC evolved a distinctive hybrid regional culture, silver in the form of Republican denarii does actually seem to have been the preferred medium of exchange for slaves, and Roman Republican coinage flooded into the area in extremely large quantities when the suppression of piracy in the eastern Mediterranean enforced the development of other avenues for slave procurement (Crawford 1977).
This unusual situation only emphasizes by contrast what an insignificant role Roman, or any other, coinage played in long-range external trading activity elsewhere. Outside the Danube Basin, trade between the Celts and the Mediterranean world was conducted by means of direct exchange, in which wine certainly played an important part. There is clear archaeological evidence that from the mid-second century BC onwards, Italian wine amphorae were being imported in rising numbers into almost every area of Gaul and even southern Britain (Cunliffe 1991: 434 ff.), betraying local accumulation of wealth, prestige and power; and within this social context Celtic coinages began to proliferate and spread, with increasingly well-differentiated designs that are sometimes far removed from their remote Mediterranean models.
As the use of coinage spread from its earliest centres, therefore, a number of discrete regional groupings took shape, each with its own characteristic repertoire of types and styles, weights and metals (Allen and Nash 1980; Nash 1987). There are still many areas, particularly in parts of continental Europe, in which coinage is almost the only source of Information for the Celts in the second century BC. This is no accident: at that time many Celtic communities, like the immigrants to northern Italy described by Polybius, seem to have invested a disproportionate amount of their wealth in the sorts of movable or perishable goods and livestock that were necessary to maintain social relationships and political hierarchies, but spent relatively little on the sort of monumental building that readily attracted archaeological attention in the past. In very recent years, however, painstaking archaeological research, aided by aerial surveys, is gradually filling in the picture in selected areas.
One of the things that makes the absolute dating of Celtic coinages so difficult is that they were almost certainly never issued on a regular annual basis, but were instead produced in a series of discontinuous episodes, as and when they were needed, to make distributions, mark special occasions, make customary payments or alliance gifts, pay soldiers, and so on. Crises in political life, perhaps especially surrounding changes of ruler, and periods of civil or external warfare were all likely to be expensive times with very high coinage output, but almost nothing is known for certain about the detailed history of the societies concerned that would help in interpreting apparent fluctuations in the production of individual coinages. The Gallic War with Caesar (58-51 BC) is one of the few adequately documented periods of crisis that certainly did provoke enormous quantities of coinage in almost every area of Gaul. It is therefore a valuable landmark in attempting to determine the chronology of late Gaulish and early British coinage.
Gaesar’s successful conquest of Gaul in 52-51 BC brought an end to its independent coinages. Gold went out of use immediately, and documentary evidence suggests that a lot of what was then in existence was actually confiscated. The Imperial biographer Suetonius reported the tradition that
In Gaul [Gaesar] plundered large and small temples of their votive offerings, and... as a result collected larger quantities of gold than he could handle, and began selling it for silver, in Italy and the provinces, at 750 denarii to the pound, which was about two-thirds of the official exchange rate.
{Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Julius Caesar 54)
Suetonius may be suggesting that the price Gaesar got for his gold was due to its excessive quantity, but it should also be remembered that the standard Geltic gold stater of the Gallic War period was debased by around one-third, which would also account for a realistic lowering of bullion prices (Castelin 1974: 13). Within the new Gallic provinces, several rather Romanized silver coinages and many local bronze issues went on being produced until close to the end of the first century BC, when Augustus’s mint at Lugdunum took over as the sole official source of new coinage in Gaul. At least another century was to elapse, however, before the last of the old Celtic bronzes went completely out of circulation for everyday use.
Across the Channel, meanwhile, as Roman trading networks for slaves and raw materials extended ever further afield, new centres of accumulated wealth emerged in southern Britain, and the history of British coinage reveals some very interesting aspects of the evolving relationship between northern Gaul and Britain at the end of the first millennium BC. Two very different regions of northern Gaul were routinely involved with Britain; both had well-developed coinages of their own in the second and first centuries BC, but their impact upon Britain was strikingly different.
The first was Armorica, modern Brittany. Here, some of the most beautifully and independently designed of all Celtic coinages were issued first in alloyed gold and eventually in silver and debased silver, from at least the early second century BC onwards, to meet the internal needs of the Armorican communities. Although the Armoricans were renowned sea-traders, and were actively involved in the distribution of Mediterranean trade goods to Britain (Cunliffe 1991: 4}4ff.), their coinages were neither issued to facilitate trade, nor evidently used except very incidentally in the course of intertribal or cross-Channel trading activity.
From the outset, therefore, Armorican coinages tend to have rather compact and well-localized geographical distributions, seldom straying far from their communities of origin on the Continent. Compared with their abundance in Gaul itself, very few Armorican coins have been found in Britain, despite the very well-attested and long-standing sea-trade that went on between Armorica and south-western Britain. In Britain, Armorican coins, mainly of the Coriosolites, who seem to have been the most active carriers of trade goods on this route, tend to cluster in and around Channel ports of trade such as Hengistbury Head, Mount Batten and Selsey Bill, where foreign traders may well have resided. Elsewhere, finds of Armorican coins are only sparsely distributed, mainly in western counties of southern England (Cunliffe 1991: 544, map). Compared with the density of distribution of contemporary Belgic coins in south-eastern Britain, this is the merest scattering.
There is at present no reason to think that any Armorican coinage was actually struck in Britain, and none of the Armorican coinages was directly imitated in Britain either, although the Durotriges of Dorset (in most direct contact with Armorica) did eventually adopt the Armorican custom of using debased silver for coinage, and a few other central-southern communities displayed some Armorican influence in the flamboyant design of their earliest silver coinages in the mid-first century BC. There could hardly be a better demonstration that even centuries of trading contact with a coin-using people was seldom, if ever, in itself of much importance in inspiring the adoption of coinage.
For a Celtic community to do that, it had to be against a background of more complex social involvement.
This was the case in the relationship between Belgic Gaul and Britain. Here, coast-to-coast trading activity, although it probably went on, was only one, and by no means the most important, of the ties that had linked the Celts of Belgic Gaul and the Seine Basin with southern and eastern Britain for centuries. There is, for instance, both archaeological and documentary evidence for at least some degree of direct immigration from Gaul before and during the period when coinage was first introduced to the island. Julius Caesar himself observed that the inhabitants of Kent were almost indistinguishable from the Belgae of adjacent areas of Gaul, and that in other parts of Britain too there were colonial settlements with the same names as their communities of origin on the Continent {De Bello Galileo V.12.1-2, V.14.1).
Perhaps Belgic immigrants in such settlements were always in a small minority compared with resident native populations, but they seem to have been influential among their new neighbours all the same. They were almost certainly instrumental in maintaining a current of social contact that involved all manner of traditional interchange with Picardy and the Seine Basin, in the course of which Belgic coinage was introduced into south-eastern Britain. Only four examples of the earliest types of third - or early-second-century Belgic gold coinage have been found in Britain, three of them in Kent, but later Belgic coinage entered Britain in enormous quantities starting in the mid - or late second century BC (Haselgrove 1992). The Belgae established ties with non-Belgic British communities as well, and during Caesar’s wars in Gaul, British tribes gave military assistance to the Gauls, paid for, undoubtedly, in the Belgic gold coinage of the day, which flooded into Britain.
The process of introduction of Belgic coinage to Britain and subsequent British adoption of their own types based on Belgic prototypes (Table 14.2) has therefore much in common with the way in which Mediterranean coinage gave rise to Celtic continental coinages in the first place. By contrast with Armorican coinage, that of Belgic Gaul and its immediate neighbours had a profound and lasting impact upon British coinage, suggesting a quite different level of involvement between the two areas of northern Gaul and Britain.
Having begun to produce coinage of their own during the late second and early first century BC, the native communities of southern Britain went on to develop one of the most sophisticated coinage systems anywhere in the Celtic world. This took place above all during a period of lively diplomatic and trading contact with the Romans in Gaul between c.50 BC and AD 43 which fostered dynastic expansion among the leading tribes of central-southern and eastern Britain (Haselgrove 1992; cf. Mack 1975; Van Arsdell 1989).
The relentless advance of the Roman Empire affected relations among the Celts not only by promoting the internal development of allies, favoured trading partners, and other members of their supply networks, but also by conquest of successive Celtic societies close to their borders, starting with Cisalpine Gaul in 191-100 BC, then Provence and Languedoc in 121 BC, the rest of Gaul in 58-52 BC, Noricum in C.35-16 BC, the Alps in 14 BC, and finally southern Britain in AD 43-60. In each case, native gold coinage, which had no place in the Roman economy, came promptly to an end. Some version of native silver and bronze coinage often went on being produced for a generation or so in the new Roman provinces, until metropolitan Roman coinage was fully established in circulation (Nash 1987: 23 ff.).
When the Roman conquest of Britain finally extinguished native coinage in the 60s AD, it also brought the entire history of Celtic coinage to an end. Beyond the Roman frontier in Britain, Celtic societies that had never used coinage of any sort took their turn to be the closest neighbours of the Roman Empire, making alliances, doing trade, being preyed upon, and accumulating wealth and prestige, but without ever adopting coinage for their own use. The Romans did not employ mercenary soldiers, nor did they, or their British provincial subjects, ever seem to use coinage in any other very systematic way in dealing with the Scots and the Irish. Although, therefore, plenty of Roman coinage did cross the imperial frontier in the course of three and a half centuries, it almost certainly did so in a haphazard, incidental way. Unlike the continental Celts and the southern British who had evidently already integrated foreign coinage into their own systems of social relations during the generations preceding the introduction of coinages of their own, the Scots and the Irish had little or no such history of exposure to the use of coinage, and continued to prosper without it.
Table 14.2 Principal prototypes for British coinage
British coinage
Origin in Gaul
Picardy earliest gold (late 3rd/early and century BC)
Picardy wide flan gold staters (=Gallo-Belgic A, mid-and-early ist century BC)
Gaulish potin (and century BC)
Picardy Gallo-Belgic C gold (c. 100-60 BC), the single most influential prototype for early British gold coinage
Belgic gold quarter-staters, geometric design (Gallo-Belgic DC), uncertain coastal origin (c. 100-60 BC)
Belgic silver coinages (late and/ist century BC)
Picardy uniface staters (= Gallo-Belgic
E, c.60-50 BC)
Suessiones gold staters (= Gallo-Belgic F, c. 60-50 BC)
Aulerci Eburovices gold (c.70-50 BC)
Ambiani under Roman control (after 50 BC)
Roman coinage current in Gaul (50 BC-AD 40)
A few found, esp. Kent, but not copied
Numerous imports, centre of distribution probably Kent; some late issues probably struck in Britain; not copied
Imported, mainly Kent, then first British potin coinage begins by late and century (focus in Kent)
Imports same area; first gold copies c. 8 0-60 BC on periphery of areas of distribution of Picardy coinages
Numerous imports, inspired coastal British gold and silver types c. 8 0/60 BC and later
Few known imports, but inspired British silver types from mid-ist century BC onwards
The main Belgic coinage of the Gallic war; imported in huge quantities into Britain, some probably struck there, but only slightly influential with subsequent British coin design (some uniface staters of eastern Britain)
Few known imports, but inspired early gold of Atrebatic dynasty and neighbours
Few known imports, but inspired silver types of central-southern and western Britain
Some imports, and inspired bronze types, esp. in Kent from c.20 BC onwards
Modest imports; influenced coinage types in all metals in dynasties of southern and eastern Britain, c. 15 BC onwards
World History
