Silver coinage was issued on a large scale in Anglo-Saxon England from the mid eighth century, but evidence for its use in north-west England prior to the arrival of the Vikings is extremely limited. In the ninth century, much of modern-day Lancashire and Cumbria fell under Northumbrian rule and contemporary coins minted at the Northumbrian capital, York, are occasionally found west of the Pennines. However, these consisted not of regular silver pennies of the type minted in other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but of small, highly debased silver/copper-alloy coins, known today as stycas. The issue of debased coins suggests that precious metal was in short supply in Northumbria, although it is also possible that the coins were specifically designed for use in everyday, low-value transactions (Williams 2008, 48). In the North West, stycas have been found in substantial quantities at the Cumbrian monastic centres of Carlisle and Dacre, and in smaller numbers on coastal sites including Grange-over-Sands (Cumbria); a probable styca hoard, of uncertain size, is also known from Otterspool (Lancs) (Howard-Davis et al. 2009, p. 686; Newman 2006, p. 105; Metcalf 1960, p. 94, pp. 97-98). This distribution points to market activity at settled monastic communities and to seaborne trade along the Irish Sea coast, but is not indicative of a widespread monetary economy. Further south, evidence for coin use in the pre-Viking period in Cheshire, part of Anglo-Saxon Mercia, is even rarer. With the exception of a small group of eighth - and ninth-century coins, including four stycas, from the trading site of Meols on the Wirral peninsula, contemporary coin finds from Cheshire are practically non-existent, meaning that the local population will have been largely unfamiliar with coinage (Griffiths et al. 2007, p. 343).
Coin use thus appears to have been limited in the region, but this is not to say that there was a lack of wealth or indeed currency. Rather than operating a monetary economy, it is likely that the inhabitants of north-west England valued and traded wealth via a different medium, namely commodities (Skre 2011; Gullbekk 2011). It is difficult to gauge the precise nature and extent of commodity exchange from the archaeological record, but surviving documentary evidence from neighbouring regions of the western British Isles indicates a system in which payments could be made in various kinds of goods, on a par with coinage. In the early medieval Irish law codes, for instance, commodities such as cattle, silver and, less certainly, grain are described as means of payments for fines and other forms of social obligations. They could be valued in standardised units relative to each other and also provided units of account (Gerreits 1985). Thus, in the text known as Crith Gablach, one cumal (a measurement standard, which also means ‘female slave’) is worth ten cows, and is also a measurement of silver (Charles-Edwards 1993, pp. 478-85). As it appears in the law codes, payment in commodities relates only to social obligations, but it is possible that such a system also characterised commercial trade at local and regional levels (Skre 2011, p. 68). Unfortunately, there is no surviving documentary evidence relating to north-west England, but the practice there of a similar ‘commodity money’ system seems likely.
World History
