Anglo-Saxon Micro-Texts

Ursula Lenker, Lucia Kornexl, Ursula Lenker, Lucia Kornexl

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110629842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

In this volume, scholars from different disciplines – Old English and Anglo-Latin literature and linguistics, palaeography, history, runology, numismatics and archaeology – explore what are here called 'micro-texts', i.e. very short pieces of writing constituting independent, self-contained texts. For the first time, these micro-texts are here studied in their forms and communicative functions, their pragmatics and performativity.

Part I: Micro-Texts beyond Manuscripts

Reading Money: An Introduction to Numismatic Inscriptions in Anglo-Saxon England

Rory Naismith

University of Cambridge

Abstract

Coin inscriptions are the most plentiful form of micro-text from Anglo-Saxon England. The many personal names they carry have been studied from a philological perspective. This contribution therefore takes a different approach, considering what coin inscriptions suggest about language, literacy and the structures of oral and written communication behind the coinage.

1 Introduction: Coin Inscriptions as Micro-Texts

It is difficult to get more micro than the micro-texts on Anglo-Saxon coins. The letters on these struck metal disks are typically between one and three millimetres in length (and the coins themselves between about 10 and 25 millimetres in diameter), and the total inscription will usually only run to one, two or three words per side, sometimes heavily abbreviated. These are micro in every sense of the word. Yet they also effectively reinforce why micro-texts matter.

Coin inscriptions range in date from the early seventh century to 1066, covering more than four centuries of Anglo-Saxon history, although they only became common after the mid-eighth century.¹ Coin inscriptions were carefully engraved by manufacturers, as the information they conveyed was fundamental to the acceptability of a coin. It was through condensed and often abbreviated micro-texts – as on the penny of Æthelred II (978–1016) illustrated as Figure 1 – that one knew this was a coin issued under the auspices of a ruler, and that he was a ‘king of the English’: +æðelræd rex anglo[rum]. To reject the coin was thus to reject the king and to adulterate it was to undermine the king’s rule, and law-codes from the time of Æthelstan onwards described the heavy penalties that awaited those who did either (Screen 2007: 164–170). The reverse of the coin gives the name of the man who made the coin – and, to my knowledge, it was always a man (no female moneyers ever being named in England) – along with where he was based, in this case Ælfstan at Totnes in Devon.

Figure 1: +æðelræd rex anglo[rum]/+ælfstan mωo tota. Æthelred II, silver penny, ‘Long Cross’-type, Totnes mint, moneyer Ælfstan (image: CNG).

Coin inscriptions also matter in crude quantitative terms. They represent the most plentiful single source of inscriptions surviving from Anglo-Saxon England. At a conservative estimate, there are some 120,000 surviving specimens with an inscription of some sort. It is likely that they represent only a tiny fraction of the number of coins originally produced, which must have run into the millions.² While use of gold and silver pieces was more common among the wealthy, as well as town-dwellers and merchants, most of the population would have come into contact with them at some stage in their day-to-day lives (Naismith 2014b). For the average Anglo-Saxon, therefore, coins would very probably have been the most familiar and frequently-encountered object bearing text.

Of course, that is not to say that the bulk of the population was in a position to get much out of these inscriptions. The limitations of early medieval literacy are widely known, and occasionally very apparent in relation to coinage: when coins were forged or imitated, for instance, the accuracy of inscriptions typically declined. This can be observed across the Anglo-Saxon period, from gold issues of the seventh century which borrowed the general look of Roman coins and the format of Merovingian ones, but not the literate inscriptions of either, to Anglo-Viking coins of the ninth and tenth centuries, and on into the late Anglo-Saxon period. The inscriptions on these coins run from the recognisable but mangled through to just a meaningless series of strokes and circles. I will not dwell on such pseudo-inscriptions except to stress that they underscore the prominence of letters and literacy even among those who did not possess the requisite learning to comprehend them. There was an expectation that coins should carry something that looked broadly like script even if its content was meaningless.

2 Numismatic Epigraphy

The script in which these micro-texts were engraved has received surprisingly little attention in scholarship (Naismith 2017: 372–379). Partly this is a result of the relatively brief nature of most such texts, but it is also a consequence of disciplinary divides: with the important exception of coins carrying runes, which are well known to runologists (Blackburn 1991; Page 1999: 117–129), numismatic inscriptions have not usually been seen as within the purview of epigraphists or palaeographers. This is not the case with other contemporary coinages elsewhere in Europe: there is a strong tradition of epigraphic study of Visigothic coinage in Spain, for instance (Pliego Vázquez 2009). In England, unfortunately, the single largest body of epigraphic material from the Anglo-Saxon period has received only scant attention, and is a subject crying out for more detailed work.

Some initial observations can be offered, however, based in large part on having recently worked through nearly 3,000 Anglo-Saxon coins from across the period while preparing the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection for publication (Naismith 2017). The first thing to stress is that the large majority of Anglo-Saxon inscriptions are executed in capitals, although as with many display scripts there is a significant degree of eclecticism in letter-forms. Non-classical letter-forms found on Anglo-Saxon coins include top-barred A, or A with a chevron-shaped cross-bar; angular C, G and S; lozenge-shaped O; uncial D; and an M made up of three vertical strokes crossed by a horizontal. Elisabeth Okasha has described this form of script as “Anglo-Saxon capitals”, and identified a similar admixture of letter-forms on many other inscribed objects of Anglo-Saxon date (Okasha 1968: 321), although broadly similar scripts were also used elsewhere in western Europe, including on coins.

The highest degree of diversity in the lettering of coin inscriptions came in the eighth and ninth centuries. Pennies of Offa, king of the Mercians (757–796), gamely mix several variants of the same letter in the same word, as seen in Figures 2a and b with D and E, while an uncial form of M became established as the preferred shorthand for Merciorum, persisting into the 870s. The specifically Old English letter ð is always cast in lower case on Offa’s coinage, although the capital form had probably been used on coins since the early seventh century, appearing on one of the first inscribed Anglo-Saxon gold coins of King Eadbald of Kent (616×618–640) (Shaw 2013: 128–134). But in the later eighth century, a generation of moneyers avoided capital Ð quite scrupulously – a practice that seems to have been largely numismatic, with only one parallel I have been able to find in the inscription on a later gold ring (Okasha 1971: no. 156).

Figure 2a: offa rex/+dud. Offa of Mercia, silver penny, London (...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Anglo-Saxon Micro-Texts: An Introduction
• Part I: Micro-Texts beyond Manuscripts
• Part II: Scribal Engagement in Manuscripts
• Part III: From Scribbles, Glosses and Mark-Ups to Text
• Part IV: Old English and Anglo-Latin Poetry
• Index of Manuscripts
• General Index