INTRODUCTION

Loss of weight through circulation is an important constant of coin behaviour. In coin of the late twentieth century, wear tends to be masked by the use of hard alloys, and by frequent replacement with new coin. But the effects of wear were still very obvious in the Victorian pennies circulating in Britain a few decades ago. Roman coin was not deliberately hardened by alloy, and it was often allowed to go on circulating for very long periods. As a result, surviving coin often shows obvious effects of wear, and large coin-hoards reveal different stages in this process.

Coin-hoards offer samples whose approximate date of deposit is normally indicated by the date of the latest coin. A hoard will generally represent a sample of the coin circulating at a particular date in antiquity. By contrast, museum or dealers' collections, however large, offer no scope for analysing wear, because they do not represent single samples of known date.

Few large hoards of the period have so far been published in detail. But the position has recently improved, and the biggest samples available provide enough detail to show patterns of coin-wear. From these hoards we can examine the rate of weight-loss over the extended periods for which weight-standards remained approximately the same. In big samples, the results suggest that the rate of wear was approximately linear, as in modern evidence (n.33). These results can be compared with the much fuller modern data.