In the decades around AD 1000 the coinage of England was issued with a regularity and consistency unique in the Western world. While the currencies of Islam and Byzantium underwent frequent interruptions and changes in standards, and those of the rest of Europe were subject to a continued debasement of silver content and localization of issues, English coinage maintained a steady standard of fineness and weight and became the basis of new coinages across an arc of northern Europe. This coinage formed the focus of the research of Mark Blackburn (1953–2011), who abandoned successive careers in the law and in the City to devote himself to his long-time personal interest in numismatics; at the time of his early death he was Keeper of the Department of Coins and Medals of the Fitzwilliam Museum and a lecturer at Cambridge University. The twenty-five contributions to this memorial volume by Blackburn’s colleagues and students serve as an excellent overview and updating of the state of research on the coinage that helped England establish itself as an economic power in the later Middle Ages.

The English silver penny grew out of the post-Roman coinage of Merovingian France, which was based on gold and had no subsidiary denominations and thus was an insufficient basis for a monetized economy. In the course of the seventh century, gold denominations experienced a rapid debasement that resulted in silver coinages on both sides of the English Channel, with the most common type represented by virtually indistinguishable issues from English and Frisian mints. The volume’s contribution by D. M. Metcalf, “Thrymas and sceattas and the Balance of Payments,” focused on these early issues, continues this scholar’s efforts to extract broad economic implications from technical numismatic indices, reaching conclusions that have been challenged as overly ambitious by some scholars (including Blackburn), but provocative and enlightening by others (including the present reviewer). The apparently loose control of minting of the silver coinages of the eighth century was brought into centralized royal control in England and the Carolingian Empire by parallel reforms of Offa and Charlemagne, respectively, shortly before AD 800. Several articles in the volume, most notably two by Simon Coupland, elucidate the Carolingian coin reforms and their aftermath, but little attention is given here to the English developments of same period.

The year AD 973 is accepted as a signal date in English coinage, the numismatic equivalent of the joining of the separate kingdoms of the heptarchy under unified rule, when King Edgar “the Peaceable” established a system whereby as many as forty-four mints throughout the island issued a coinage of consistent appearance and standard, struck from dies produced at central workshops. A notable aspect of this system was the periodic change of appearance of the coins and the demonetization of old issues, a phenomenon that lasted well beyond the Norman Conquest. This system is virtually undocumented by contemporary written sources, and it has been up to numismatists to explain the chronology and mechanisms of the recoinages on the basis of minute examination of surviving specimens and investigation of their find contexts, areas in which Mark Blackburn made enormous contributions. The historical and numismatic context of Edgar’s reform is laid out in a superb chapter by one of the volume’s editors Rory Naismith, titled “Prelude to Reform: Tenth-Century English Coinage in Perspective,” which had its origin as a research paper produced under Blackburn’s direction. While Blackburn wrote definitive studies of the end of the recoinage system under Henry I and Stephen, the period immediately preceding this is thoroughly analyzed in a contribution by another of the volume’s editors, Martin Allen, in “Coinage and Currency under William I and William II.”

Another area of major study by Blackburn comprised the coinages of the regions dominated by Viking incursion and settlement, characterized by imitation and immobilization of English types. In “Coins and Currency in Viking England, AD 865–954,” Gareth Williams gives a sweeping overview of the earliest phase of these coinages, with a thorough consideration of methodological innovations advanced by Blackburn. Monetary phenomena in various parts of Britain in the Viking era are investigated in contributions by Megan Gooch in “The Swordless St Peter Coinage of York, c.905–c.919”; Joe Leighton and Andrew R. Woods in “Insular Imitations of Aethelred II’s Long Cross Coinage”; Andrew R. Woods in “Monetary Activity in Viking-Age Ireland: The Evidence of the Single-Finds”; and Kristin Bornholdt Collins, Allison Fox, and James Graham-Campbell in “The 2003 Glenfaba Hoard (c.1030), Isle of Man.” Other contributions to the volume trace the influence of English coins, and Viking imitations of them, on developing coinages in Scandinavia.

While the coins issued in England in the central Middle Ages were all silver pennies, gold issues of the Mediterranean world were well known there, as discussed by the late Marion M. Archibald in a chapter titled “Islamic and Christian Gold Coins from Spanish Mints Found in England, Mid-Eleventh to Mid-Thirteenth Centuries”; and by Cécile Morrisson in “Byzantine Coins in Early Medieval Britain: A Byzantinist’s Assessment.” Like many of the other contributions to the volume, the latter chapter makes extensive use of data from the digital Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds (http://www-cm.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/emc/), established at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1997 under Blackburn’s leadership. Like other aspects of Britain’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, this resource is based on the recording of discoveries by metal detectorists and other unauthorized individuals; the voluminous data thereby preserved and presented, and the historical inferences based on it published in this volume, bear testimony to the positive aspects of this controversial approach to antiquities management.

In the later Middle Ages, the silver penny in England ceased to be subjected to periodic renewals but maintained its consistent sterling fineness; it was joined by silver groat multiple and various gold issues to form a more comprehensive coinage system capable of handling the large transactions of the wool trade and continental military expeditions. The debt of this later monetary system to its Anglo-Saxon and Norman predecessors is well documented in the scholarly work of Mark Blackburn and in the volume dedicated to his memory.