Join us in Online or in Cambridge for a day of talks on coins at the intersection of the Late Roman Empire & Early Medieval Europe.

Coinage in the Late Roman Empire & Early Medieval Europe

Join us at the Faculty of English or Online on September 5, 2026 at 10:00 AM (BST) for a symposuym on the world of coinage during the Late Roman Empire and Early Medieval Europe.

See below for an Agenda.

Abstracts

Kelly Clarke-Neish, New approaches to the study of Britain's “last” Roman hoards

Late Roman hoards are a crucial source of evidence to explore the transition from the late Roman to early medieval period in Britain. Collectively, they contain thousands of artefacts including jewellery and tableware, and some hoard containers also exist. Most hoards also contain small silver coins known as siliqua (siliquae pl.) and these coins frequently display evidence of the deliberate removal of silver (‘clipping’) from their edges. Clipping has long been recognised as a key phenomenon which occurred in late and post-Roman Britain (and elsewhere to a lesser degree) and the study of the tens of thousands of coins from the Hoxne hoard, the largest gold and silver late Roman hoard known from Britain, revealed that the practice was a long and drawn out process and coins underwent successive rounds of clipping (Guest, 2005).

Though our understanding of clipping has greatly improved, the exact chronology of clipping and whether it was a controlled act remains uncertain and no major study of clipping has been carried out since the study of Hoxne. This paper presents the key findings of an in-depth study of over 10,000 siliquae from over fifty late Roman hoards undertaken as part of the AHRC funded project ‘Britain’s last Roman hoards: wealth, power and culture in the fifth century’ (2024-2026). As well as examining and identifying the clipping of these coins first-hand, statistical techniques were applied to the coin hoard data to identify underlying patterns between these late Roman hoards. Coupled with the results of an independent study of artefacts, a revised chronology for the duration of clipping will be suggested.

Roger Bland, Why does Britain have so many coin hoards of the 4th and 5th centuries?

Britain has a uniquely rich record of coin hoards, and the hoards of the Roman period were the subject of an AHRC research project in 2014-20 which produced two books on the subject (Roger Bland, Coin hoards and hoarding in Roman Britain, AD 43 – c. 491, BNS Special Publication 13, 2018, and Bland et al., Iron Age and Roman Coin Hoards in Britain, Oxbow Books, 2020). That project sought to understand why there are so many hoards of the second half of the third century from Britain, but in fact it is in the 4th and 5th centuries that Britain has the greatest number of hoards. The online database of the Oxford Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project now has over 3,900 hoards that close between 294 and 491 from across the Empire and beyond, 38% of which are from Britain, an extraordinary concentration. While the exceptional number of hoards of silver siliquae from Britain has long been recognised, Britain also has many hoards of bronze coins. This paper looks at possible reasons for this phenomenon and looks at developments in the immediate post-Roman period, into the sixth and seventh centuries.

Marcus Spencer-Brown, The demise of base-metal coinage as a political medium in the Late Roman period

A defining characteristic of Roman coinage was the variety of its designs and the diverse political messages they were intended to communicate. In marked contrast to much of the relatively static ‘Greek’ coinage that preceded it, Roman coin imagery was actively employed by elites of the late Republic and subsequent imperial regimes as an overtly political medium through which contributions to the res publica could be promoted and status negotiated. Scholarship has long connected episodes of rapid iconographic innovation with periods of instability and anxiety, while phases of relative monotony—such as the Antonine period—have been interpreted as indicative of imperial confidence and internal peace.

Yet this interpretative model is less readily applicable to the Late Roman period. Despite recurrent civil wars, religious conflict, and sustained external pressures, such turbulence was not matched by comparable innovation in coin design. Instead, increasingly repetitive and standardised types dominated issues from the empire’s many mints.

This paper argues that the apparent mismatch between fourth-century political instability and the genericised expressions of imperial competence on base-metal coinage reflects a fundamental shift in the medium’s political function. As emperors became more itinerant and autocratic, the imperial state recalibrated the communicative ambitions of base-metal coinage, gradually marginalising it as a primary vehicle of political negotiation. In its place, Late Roman regimes developed alternative mechanisms for articu

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