INTRODUCTION

In medieval England money principally consisted of precious metal coinage made by English mints. The English currency often included some foreign coins, and base metal tokens had a minor role as small change by the fifteenth century, but the issue of paper money from English banks began only in the seventeenth century. The coinage of late Anglo-Saxon and Norman England was produced by large numbers of moneyers in dozens of towns and cities (see Map 1.1): in this period the word ‘mint’ is a convenient term for all of the minting facilities in one town or city, but until 1180 English moneyers usually had their own individual workshops. From 1279 the moneyers’ names were removed from the coins, and the king’s mints were placed under the management of masters supervised by wardens. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was a radical reduction in the number of mints, and by the second half of the fifteenth century London had the only regularly functioning royal mint, supplemented by temporary mints at times of recoinage and a small number of ecclesiastical mints.