INTRODUCTION

Appendix C provides a summary of all of the documented outputs of the English mints between 1220 and 1544, incorporating many amendments of previously published figures. The English records of mint output can reasonably be claimed to be the best in Europe, because there are no comparable records from other parts of Europe before the fourteenth century, apart from some much less complete figures from French mints in the second half of the thirteenth century. They are of fundamental importance as a direct measure of the activity of the mints, and as the basis of estimates of the size of the English currency, but they have two serious limitations: the outputs of the ecclesiastical mints are almost entirely undocumented, and there are some gaps in the coverage of the royal mints. In many cases coin hoards can indicate the relative sizes of recorded and unrecorded outputs after 1220, providing the means to estimate the undocumented figures. There is some indirect evidence of mint output from records of mint profits between 1195 and 1220, but estimates of output in earlier periods are entirely dependent upon the analysis of data from die studies.