“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

Alfred the Great and the Penny

We have no reliable or useful contemporary pictures of King Alfred, but there is a silver penny from his reign, illustrated above. Unfortunately (to modern eyes) if this were the only evidence for his personal appearance, we wouldn’t know much about this famous king.

The coin itself looks crude to modern eyes. If you compare almost any modern coin, you will find that the coins of the last approximately 200 years are far more sophisticated from an artistic and technical viewpoint.

But more interesting is the fact that we don’t have very many coins from any place in the early Middle Ages (roughly from 500 to 1050 CE). Of course, much of the loss can be blamed on the fact that the coins were often melted down to make new ones. Some coins were undoubtedly lost or stolen in various ways. But even when we allow for these losses, it is clear that coinage was not so widely used in the early Middle Ages as it was, let’s say, just before the Industrial Revolution.

The early Medieval economy was not nearly so market-oriented as today’s economies. Today, if you need a new shirt, let’s say, in most countries (and even for poor people) you go to a store, hand over some money (in the form of coins, bills, credit cards, or even just a simple charge to a standing account), and you get your shirt. All our evidence about early Medieval economies in Europe points towards the dominance of the feudal-estate structure. The lord owned land (probably as a grant from the king), and various retainers or serfs worked it. When they produced crops (or other goods, perhaps including cloth in some areas), they gave most of what they produced to the lord. In return for their labor, the serfs got protection from their lord, and perhaps some other benefits, depending on the lord’s sense of responsibility.

Coinage was probably rarely involved in these transactions of the early Medieval economies of Western Europe. There is some evidence that assets and goods were valued in monetary terms (especially for purposes of taxation), but in many such cases it seems unlikely that actual coinage (or any other symbol of exchange values) was employed. In other words, the existence of money was reserved for special purposes (perhaps the collection of taxes or the sale of goods at “fairs” or “markets” in certain towns) .

In other words, the role of money was quite restricted in those times as compared to our own. But this does not necessarily mean that early Medieval people were incompetent or stupid. It means, rather, that their economies were more closely tied to the basic production of agriculture. (I say “basic,” thinking of the value of food and clothing crops as opposed to less common products, such as decorated cattle horns). This close-to-the-ground strategy had important consequences. One such was surely that change was slowed down.

A second consequence of the deep roots of early Medieval economies is interesting, especially from the point of view of our times: speculation, especially in land, was difficult and comparatively rare. When the king owned (at least in some theoretical sense) all the land, speculation in real estate was almost impossible. We have occasional reports in later times of wealthy individuals cornering the market on some foodstuffs, but there is little evidence for this in early Medieval times.

It appears, thus, that the restricted role of money in early Medieval times was associated not merely with the dominance of estate-based feudalism but also with the general tendency to tie the means of production closely to land. This tendency was, of course, not universal. There were almost always merchants, moneylenders, and tax collectors, but their roles were restricted compared to what happened after the Eleventh Century CE.

In the first few years of the Twenty-First Century, we have seen a number of cases in which speculative bubbles have burst, causing sharp and widespread discomfort (to say the least). There have been many causes for these speculative disasters, but one of them is undoubtedly what is rarely mentioned - the extreme dominance of money facilitates speculation, especially when the money has no physical existence at all, being merely numbers stored electronically.

King Alfred, brilliant man that he was, would have had some difficulty in understanding our economy. He would have been forced to acknowledge the great superiority of our material wealth, but the lack of close contact with basic means of production would have looked dangerous to him. There is a trade-off when money comes to dominate the economy: on the one hand, developments of all kinds occur faster, but the economy is less stable. In the United States in the last few years we have seen the consequences of a money-dominated economy. By no means all of the consequences were bad, but the need for the various “bail-outs” to which we have recently been subjected would have astonished Alfred and his advisers, and would have been taken as a sign that our modern economy is inherently weak.

In other words, the “crudeness” of Alfred’s coinage does not necessarily mean weakness.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me