Of all the varied hammered coinage I have found, Edward seems to be one of the more common coins that keep popping up which made me wonder why this might be. My initial thought was that maybe it was just coincidence, as surely it would be more likely to find coins of the later periods than coins of some 700 plus years ago.
Prior to the 13th and 14th centuries it is possible that "coins" were more likely to be found in the hands of the wealthy and important and therefore less likely to be mislaid. Commoners person and peasants of the world would have relied on trading with a barter system, which incidentally, goes back as far as 6000BC and was introduced by Mesopotamia tribes. Goods and services would have been exchanged for all manner of things such as food, drink, weaponry etc..
The development of coinage shows the progressive change from an agricultural society to one which enjoyed more mobility and a well developed a taste for 'consumer products'. Having said that bartering would have still continued but would have become more organised with the introduction of coinage.
Talking to Rod Blunt of the UKDFD he mentioned that "The monetary economy developed rapidly in the 13th and 14th centuries. A high proportion of the medieval fairs (where currency was essential) were established during the reign of Henry III (1216-72), and many of these survived for several hundred years. Pilgrimages (for many participants the equivalent of modern-day summer vacations as missions for the truly devout ) also started to become popular at around the same time, inns providing sustenance and souvenirs ( bought and paid for in cash) were essential elements of the journey"
I wondered what kind of quantity of hammered pennies would have been in circulation at the time and my initial guess was maybe around a million or so? This seemed a fair amount of coins given how long ago we are talking? Looking in to this more closely I came across an article and I was astounded at how far out I was in my guess-timation!
The article claimed that in the re-coinage of 1279/1281 over 100 million coins were struck and in the years soon after another 60-80 million were also issued. The 1279 recoinage was largely from melting down previous short cross coinage and the 1300 coinage from melting down coins from the 1279 period that had become worn and clipped added to all the continental imitations in circulation.
There were also 4 million silver hammered farthings made but this came to an end soon after due to the coins being too small and continually being lost.
The above figures are quite staggering really when you consider this is only for the period of Edward 1st. There were allegedly over 50 million Saxon coins struck and one can only imagine how many coins were produced during the reign of all future kings and queens..
One thing this does bring to mind is that on any future detecting days out it is good to remember these figures especially when the finds may be getting a bit sparse.
Below are a few examples of the early Edwardian pennies I have found..
