Chapter 14
Towns and Trade
In Britain the Romano-British towns had been more or less abandoned when the Roman-style economy collapsed. True to their Mediterranean ancestry, the Romans in their towns had brought together three important elements of civilisation: administration, religion and trade. After the demise of the town in Britain, these elements were still necessary in the changed society and it has been said that they were dispersed to different centres. Professor Mick Aston has suggested as an example that in northern Wiltshire, Bedwyn was the site of a royal hall (administration and justice), Marlborough (the market) and Ramsbury (regional minster church). Another possible example in Leicestershire is the trio of Loughborough (financial collecting point), Barrow (royal hall) and Rothley (high status church. A market probably has to be located where trade can be centralised, the minster where the necessary land was donated by a patron but the king’s tun could be placed wherever the king held land since he led a peripatetic life at the time and did not spend very long in one place. So this tripartite system does not need towns with which to operate until government became more centralised and urban life revived in the tenth century.
Urban life grew more rapidly during the latter part of the period. This was after the introduction of the burhs and an increase in foreign trade. Activity in these new towns was greatly helped by the establishment of a stable currency and we see particular trades organising themselves into guilds as a protection against interlopers. Merchants become important figures in these towns as burgesses and it is they who play an important part in the development of the towns.
Apart from the Romano-British towns, most of which came back to life in the later post-Conquest period, it was the establishment of the Alfredian and Edwardian burhs that provided the sites of places that were to be towns in the pre-Conquest period. Like other innovations of the period in England the systematic arrangement of these strongpoints is borrowed from the Frankish Empire. Charles the Bald had built a system of fortified bridgepoints across the River Seine to block the movements of the Viking hosts and these were probably part of the inspiration for Alfred’s system.
With a few exceptions, most towns, or to be more precise, places that were the equivalent to towns at that time, were ‘country’ towns, relying for their survival on the local produce of the countryside to supply their market-places and their few industries like ale-brewing and, perhaps, cloth-making. The exceptions are mainly the older towns, cathedral towns, minster towns, and trading emporia like Lundenwic, Hamwic, Ipswich, Aldwych and York. In these we can see some evidence of embryonic town planning, especially at Hamwic which was laid out on a grid plan by 700. Examination of other places has shown that the grid plan was used in the tenth century to set out the streets in the Wessex and Mercian burhs and these may have provided a template for the planning of small rural settlements although when this happened depended more on the initiative and energy of the local lord than on any other factor but it is probable that if the place was a thriving market village that would be a useful spur to modernisation.
Once built, most of the burhs sustained themselves as towns and prospered. The typical urban road system of the time, a main street crossed by roads more or less at right angles traversing the interior to the defensive ramparts, became the standard urban layout for all towns in the future. Exeter is an example, its Roman walls refurbished by Alfred, with a Minster and, by the Conquest, thirty churches which suggest a fair-sized population. A document which provides a link between the Alfredian burh and later borough development is a Worcester charter which relates that the burh there was constructed on the order of the ealdorman and his wife to protect the cathedral and the people. On the completion of the defences they granted to the bishop half their rights in the trading in the market-place and streets, but made over to the king the toll on goods brought into the town, The king also shared with the bishop rents paid by certain properties and fines for fighting, theft and illegal trading within the town. These were the most important provisions and they and other lesser ones reinforce the supposition that the market was the most important element in the burh and it was intended to be the mainspring of future prosperity.
Information about guilds is provided by tantalising documents that do no more than tell us that such organisations existed as early as the ninth century. One document from Cambridge sets out the regulations for such an organisation. There is mention of funeral dues and almsgiving, but a good many other details are concerned with blood feuds. Exeter’s guild statutes make provision for the death of a member and some rudimentary fire insurance. Guild statutes from Dorset dating to 1040 also describe almsgiving as well as spiritual matters and the proper preparation for an ale-brewing! Law codes in English boroughs of the tenth and eleventh century provide some evidence of the status of the market and of its participants and the importance of guarding against the falsification of the currency.
These tenuous pieces of information are important, jejune though they might be, as a counter-balance to the impression given in Domesday that the town was little more than a manorial economy of the usual type. The kings tried to raise the standing of towns by attempting to confine commercial transactions to their markets under the supervision of a royal reeve and ensuring that they contained a mint and a prison. In some towns stone churches were built but these were rare anywhere but in the largest towns.
It is East Anglia that we see the most rapid growth in towns alongside the Viking presence. Ipswich, Norwich and Thetford are examples of this. At Ipswich there were defences which did not play any part in deterring the Vikings but the place was important as a ‘port’, a centre of trade, with a quayside on the River Orwell, and an economy that could support a large number of moneyers in the eleventh century and the usual proliferation of small churches which clustered around the two principal east-west and north-south routes.
In the north, the Viking kingdom of York established Jorvik as its premier trading settlement and laid the foundations of its later importance as the seat of the archbishopric and as the northern metropolis. Lincoln too had its cathedral and a thriving trade. Its population at Domesday was 5,000 along with Norwich while Thetford had 4000 and Ipswich 1300. These populations could not be supported by agriculture alone but information about commercial activities is difficult to come by.
After the Treaty of Wedmore in 878 the Viking settlement of Danelaw had been intensified although there does not seem to have been a massive immigration. It was already well-populated but the new folk seem to have integrated without too much trouble although fashions in the artefacts discovered with the aid of metal detectors developed in the Scandinavian direction very strongly during the 9th-11th centuries. Small decorated objects like brooches, buckles and pins demonstrate that people were relatively prosperous but were not outstandingly wealthy. An important natural Viking activity, that of trading, was an important factor in the growth of towns. Their undoubted commercial skills contributed in no small way to both the development and prosperity of places mentioned above and, further west, Lincoln, Stamford, Leicester, Nottingham and Derby. In the tenth century the growth of Thetford and Norwich was remarkable although Thetford declined somewhat in the eleventh. Later appearances in the senior urban stakes were Bury St Edmunds, Dunwich and Sudbury with Great Yarmouth soon joining the three other boroughs.
Some of the inhabitants of a town were burgesses, people of substance who rendered borough customs, that is, paid the necessary dues. These dues were not cheap. To rent a customary tenement, for example, was an expensive business. The main custom or (in modern terms, rent) was the payment of ‘land-gable’ to the lord of the borough. It was normally fixed at a flat rate which rose from between 4d to 7d to around a shilling in the twelfth century. This sort of rent could not be afforded by one who depended only on his share in the arable land and he would have needed some other income from a commercial activity. On occasions a burgess might have to do service with the sheriff or with the king if he visited the area to hunt or to spend time on a nearby royal manor. Apart from guard service and hunting duties, military service might be demanded of a burgess in a particular area and in certain eventualities.
Some burgesses were not resident in the town and were based on estates scattered in the surrounding district. In Gloucester, for example, eighty-one came from various manors and eight came from the borough of Tewkesbury. It has been suggested that they represent individuals who had the privilege of handling the trade of their manor at the market in Gloucester. One wonders as well whether there is any connection with the interest, evident from the tenth century onwards, that lords were taking in the opportunities of commercial profits that could be made from their estates. In those circumstances, it would be useful to have a burgess in place, so to speak, in the hierarchy of the local market town.
The later pre-Medieval period was a time of village creation. Lords were coming to realize that a village provided a more efficient method of organizing agricultural production on their estates than did scattered farms and hamlets. An increase in agricultural production could go hand-in-hand with an interest in efficient marketing and would strengthen links with the towns. This interest was not restricted to secular lords. Ecclesiastical landowners were equally active. Monasteries like Bury St Edmunds, Glastonbury and St Albans were natural magnets for entrepreneurial and landless settlers where a customer for a variety of products and an employer providing a good many jobs was on the doorstep. In this way villages and later towns were created outside their gates. Monasteries, and bishops too, were extensive landowners and could produce large quantities of goods like wool for overseas trade.
At some time during the last quarter of the seventh century both Frankish and British mints ceased to produce gold coins and from then on until the thirteenth century Europe used no home-produced gold coins. A few did circulate and they came from Byzantium and the Moslem world but in the West supplies of gold were limited, too limited to support a gold currency and for a long time the native currency in the West was overwhelmingly silver – originating with the denarius first struck by Charlemagne and the penny of Offa of Mercia. But this does not mean that the economy was in decline – one of the features of trade in the later pre-Conquest period was the enormous increase in small transactions by little men, both producers and merchants - for which the silver penny was much more companionable. The primary purpose of the earlier coinage, sometimes referred to as sceattas, was to facilitate trade between Britain and the Frisian hinterland and as the coins on both sides of the North Sea were of similar weight and type, it is often difficult to distinguish them.
Exploitation of the fishing grounds of northern Europe was in full swing by the end of the first millenium AD. Areas of the southern North Sea like the Dogger Bank were being fished from eastern England and Belgium. Danish fishermen operated in the Kattegat, Poles in the eastern Baltic and the fisherfolk of Hedeby exploited the waters of Arctic Norway. It is clear that fishing boats were now sturdy enough to face long hours of activity in challenging environments. Consumption of fish went up sharply in Europe around 1000AD but whether this was due to improving maritime fishing technology or the demand on 'fish days' is not clear. Dried stockfish was the product and analysis of variations of stable-isotope contents in isotopes of carbon and nitrogen from different regions of the ocean allow excavated fish bones to be identified with specific areas of origin. A particular result was surprising in that it showed that fishbones found in medieval excavations at the village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire were from fish caught in the Kattegat off the Swedish coast and suggests that traders from Sweden were selling their dried fish in the markets of London described below. (Journal of Arch. Science No 35)
It was a time of innovation in shipbuilding, mainly in the north where the Scandinavians were developing their famous ships but they were not the only ones. A Frisian coin from Duurstede in the ninth-century depicts a broad-beamed ship, the kog, which remained the standard merchant ship in the North Sea and the Channel for centuries. Powered by sail some time after the Scandinavians had taken it up, the vessel made the carriage of goods infinitely easier and was one of the bases on which northern European trade was built. Frisians really laid the foundation of this trade, particularly during the hundred years between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, acting as middle men, carrying goods like wine and quernstones quarried in Niedermendig from the Rhineland to England and Scandinavia and taking back from the former destination, wool, and from the former, furs, slaves and grain to the Continent.
Duurstede on the Rhine was the hub of this mercantile activity, well-placed to obtain goods from far away down- and up-river but also with a hinterland that could produce saleable goods – hides and the cloth known as pallia Frisonica. When the Franks took over the region, Duurstede entered its most prosperous phase. Excavations show that it covered an area of about thirty acres and was turned into a typical Frankish castellaria with houses spread along half a mile of the Rhine banks protected by double wooden palisades filled in with earth and fronted in the river along a good deal of its length with a dock. Its new name was the ‘wic beside Duurstede’ (Wijk-bij-Duurstede) like Lundenwic alongside its ancient city. But the Vikings were on the prowl and the place was destroyed by expeditions from the pirates’ lair on the island of Walcheren and the Norse presence drove trade away to Tiel, also on the Rhine where English merchants were again soon in evidence. Further down Channel was Quentovic on the River Canche, well served by a network of Roman roads and providing the British merchants with an important entrepôt until the harbour silted up in the mid-tenth century and its role was taken over by Wissant until it too was eclipsed by Calais during the twelfth century.
Foreign merchants were welcomed in Britain as long as they had the insurance of a surety and in favoured circumstances were allowed some freedom from the royal tolls that were levied on ships using English ports. During the eighth century we hear some titbits about the English export of textiles. Later, the export in this department was to be raw wool and it made England rich but it is interesting that it started, perhaps as far back as the Roman period, with the finished textiles. There are records of monasteries in the Frankish Empire ordering lengths of English cloth in a variety of colours which seem quite un-monklike while there are Moslem documentary entries during the centuries from the ninth to the eleventh that recommend English materials.
As mentioned above, one of the important cargoes of the time was slaves, an English trade that continued to the Norman Conquest and beyond for in the eleventh century there were still slavers operating out of Bristol and regulations were still being formulated against it in 1102. Most slaves were people incurring legal penalties and suffering economic pressures resulting in debt but some were children sold into slavery by their parents or, in the last resort, a man might sell himself into slavery to escape a situation like a vendetta or blood-feud. Apart from these situations, slaves could be taken in war or as a consequence of not meeting the obligations of a freeman or a whole household could be enslaved if one of its members committed a theft with their connivance or knowledge.
Slaves taken to the Frankish Empire would follow a usual trade route to Marseilles which from the north was up the Rhine and down the Rhone, partly by water and partly by road and thence be shipped to Italy, North Africa and Spain where they could be sold in slave markets like those established by the new Moslem conquerors of the latter two areas. Frankish entrepreneurs were foremost in the supply of slaves especially after they had established themselves in Slav communities during the seventh century and captives in the intercine wars there flooded the market. The very name Slav was the term from which the word ‘slave’ was derived.
Before the universal changeover to the use of barrels, pottery sherds from amphorae are good evidence for the import of wine (possibly also oil) into England. These have been found with eight-century coins at Hamwic and later in Canterbury and London but they are not found later on. Wine was drunk by those who could afford it. and also put to ecclesiastical use but consumption is probably under-estimated since barrel-staves do not survive in excavation sites. Viticulture had spread from northern Italy to the south of France and to Bordeaux after the area became a Roman province, bringing to an end the happy time for Roman merchants who had made themselves rich by exporting wine at inflated prices from Narbonne to the Gallic chieftains. We have evidence from Diodorus Siculus:
The Gauls are exceedingly fond of wine and sate themselves with the unmixed wine (drunk without water) imported by merchants; their desire makes them drink it greedily and when they become drunk they fall into a stupor or into a maniacal disposition. Therefore many Italian merchants …..look upon the Gallic love of wine as their treasures trove. They transport the wine by boat on navigable rivers and by wagon through the plains and receive in return for it an incredibly high price, for one jar of wine they receive in return a slave, a servant in return for the drink.
Presumably, the Romans first introduced viticulture to England but we can’t be sure whether it took root, so to speak. Domesday Book lists a fair number of vineyards in southern England but these may be a re-introduction since the unit of measurement used, the arpent, is a Norman one. During post-Roman times most wine is likely to have been imported and was probably similar to the ordinaire produced in the same areas of eastern France today. It was not an everyday drink even then for Aelfric, the English scholar, writing in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, says in a colloquy he wrote for schoolboys that it was a drink for the wealthy and not for children or fools but for old and wise men! During his time, it was the Rhineland that provided the bulk of the wine that was drunk in England.
Viking journeys widened the world horizons of the time. King Alfred put into a book an account of two northern voyages, one by the Viking Ohthere and the other by Wulfstan of Hedeby. Ohthere travelled into the far north and described the wealth that was available there: whale and walrus products, furs, eider-down and sealskin used for ropes. In this way the Vikings opened up the north trade. A chain of markets was set up from Dublin to Kiev. Navigation points bear names that are often Scandinavian in origin like Steepholm, Skokholm and Flatholm in the Bristol Channel demonstrating that it was people who spoke a Scandinavian language who first opened up ports like Bristol to regular trade across the Irish Sea. The Cuerdale hoard from Lancashire was probably deposited by a Scandinavian and amongst its seven thousand coins were, apart from five thousand from Scandinavian mints in East Anglia and York, examples from all parts of the Carolingian Empire and the Moslem world, representing a tapestry of Viking trading enterprise.
Religious bias against profit and usury may have hindered the development of a merchant class in Britain after Augustine’s introduction of Christianity in the late sixth century but this religious condemnation does not seem not have bothered traders in later Roman times which was already a Christian period and it is indicative of a different religious attitude – more censorious and authoritarian – that seems to have dominated religious life for the thousand years after c600. So much does it seem to be the attitude that the merchant in Aelfric’s colloquy is anxious to defend his calling, protesting that he was useful to all, circulating goods that otherwise would not be available and only taking sufficient profit for his labour to keep his wife and family out of poverty. This is certainly not a true entrepreneurial spirit. But there was a social cachet to be earned. If he made three voyages, he could become a thegn and get a step up in the world. However, it is interesting to note that it was the monasteries that were amongst the first to chafe against the puritanical attitude to commerce and this trend culminated with the Cistercians and their wool and iron production and similar enterprises in the thirteenth century as well as other Orders like the Cluniacs at Castle Acre with grain products in the fourteenth..
The overland trade routes that the merchant traversed are not altogether well-known today but some were surely across the Channel and along rivers to various parts of Europe. Sailing routes across the North Sea were certainly important during and after the Viking period with the appearance of furs and the demand for the fish that was commanded by the Church for Friday fish days. By the eleventh century dried cod was being exported from Arctic Norway for Lent and for military rations (Barrett). Fish were being both dried and smoked, stimulating the growth of the fishing industry itself and the development of one of the first food processing industries along the east coast of England. Recent research has demonstrated that there was a country-wide increase in marine fishing around the year 1000. The researchers suggest that overfishing of inland waterways caused a scarcity that was compensated for by an increase in catches of cod and herring in deeper waters. (Barrett) Billingsgate was already in operation as a market, not just for fish, but the two clauses that relate to fish appear in a list of tolls in operation from c978 to 1016:
‘If a small ship arrive at Billingsgate it will give one obole (half-penny) as thelony (toll); if a larger ship, and if it has a sail, one denarius (penny). If it is a long ship or a barge and it stays there, one penny as thelony.
The other clause also gives some idea of the range of other goods arriving at the Billingsgate quay:
From a ship full of timber, one log as thelony (tax). A freight ship gives thelony on three days a week namely, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. If any one comes to the bridge with a boat full of fish, he will give one obole as thelony in order to sell the fish: from a larger vessel ship he will pay one denarius. The men of Rouen who come with wine or deep-sea fish will pay six solidi (solidus or sou, the Frankish coin) for a large ship as toll and will give one twentieth of their large fish. The men of Flanders, Ponthieu, Normandy and France show their merchandise and are exempt from toll. Those of Houck, Liège and Nivelles who go through our territories pay a toll for right to display their goods and thelony. The men of the Emperor (Holy Roman Emperor) who come in their own ship are held, like ourselves, worthy of good laws. Moreover they are permitted to buy and take on their ships uncarded wool, cut off pieces of fat and three live hogs, but they are not permitted to make any imposition on the burgesses. And……they must give thelony; and on Christmas Day two grey garments, and one one brown, ten pounds of pepper, gloves for five men, two leathern tuns of vinegar, and as much at Easter; from a basket of fowls, one hen as toll, from a basket of eggs, five eggs as toll if they come to sell them. Dealers in fat, who sell cheese and butter, will pay one denarius fourteen days before Christmas and another denarius seven days after Christmas.’
It demonstrates the discrepancy between the treatment of native and foreign merchants. Even so, foreign merchants did frequent London despite the penalties and some rented or bought houses within the City.
To some extent we can attribute the large number of English silver pennies in Scandinavia to trade. Most are found in Sweden and the Isle of Gotland and this could be because it was an entrepôt for places further east. Those found with other foreign coins are part of merchant’s hoards. Further evidence of cross-North Sea trade is the number of Danish merchants resident in York. Links to the southlands, and to the Mediterranean are identified during the reign of Cnut when the king, on a visit to Rome, negotiated a relief of the heavy tolls paid by English traders to the Emperor and the Burgundian king. At Pavia, English merchants compounded for their tolls for three years with a single payment that included fifty pounds of silver, not a negligible sum, and probably a measure of the amount of trade that was coming down through the Alpine passes to the Lombardy plain.
What did Britain get in return? Mostly luxury goods. Aelfric gave as his list: purple cloth and silks, gems and gold, ivory, copper, bronze and tin (presumably objects made of these metals), fine clothing (presumably embroidered), wine and oil, sulphur and glassware. The more plebeian goods like cloth, hides and fish came from northern Europe.
It is difficult to know how well the king was able to protect traders out at sea. Certainly he would have had responsibility for coastal seaways but how far this extended from the coast is impossible to say. The great problem with trading in the seas of northern Europe was piracy, mainly carried on by Vikings but probably involving others when they saw a favourable opportunity even on a peaceful trading voyage..
The most important service performed by the later kings was the preservation of the stable coinage. Offa’s silver penny was the basis of the succeeding money system that was improved upon by Alfred’s decentralisation of the actual coining to local moneyers and mints in the burhs. Firm control was maintained in the following reigns by Athelstan and Edgar who announced ‘ there shall run one coinage throughout the realm’. Athelstan in his Grateley decrees lays down that in southern England ‘In Canterbury (there shall be) seven moneyers; four of the king, two of the bishop, one of the abbot; in Rochester three, two of the king, one of the bishop; in London eight; in Winchester six; in Lewes two; in Hastings one; another at Chichester; at Southampton two; at Wareham two; (at Dorchester one); at Exeter two; at Shaftesbury two; otherwise in the other boroughs one.’ From Athelstan’s time one can identify the mint as well as the name of the moneyer on the reverse of the coins. His sixth type bore the king’s head on its obverse and this remained the pattern until the advent of the Normans. On the reverse was the name of the moneyer and the abbreviation denoting the mint. LUND(E) was London, WINT was Winchester and EOFE(R) was York and most of the other mints are equally easy to identify. As the years went by the penalties for false coining became severe and the standard of coining remained high. In 1066 coins were struck at forty-four mints under Harold. Under William I continuity was maintained and this went on until the reign of Henry I when changes were made. During these hundreds of years technology continued to improve together with the appearance of the coins and some can well be described as beautiful productions.
Reforms in King Edgar’s reign ensured the king’s head was fixed at a relationship of 0º, 90º, 180º or 270º between obverse and reverse. The lack of wear on some of the coins is evidence of the fairly rapid calling-in of the old types and the issue of the new. Each time this happened the moneyers had to buy new dies from the Crown and so provide a regular income for the king. During the last years of the Saxon period, the cost of this to the moneyer was twenty shillings. After 973 the coinage type was changed every six years. After the Conquest the intervals were either two or three years. Copies of the English coinage were produced by the Welsh prince, Hywel the Good, and English moneyers helped to introduce currency into Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Of the sixty to seventy late-Saxon mints, most can be identified. The moneyers themselves operated under strict discipline and there were fierce penalties for misbehaviour. They had to be people of substance or, at least, the farmers of the mints had to be even though the craftsmen who did the actual minting could be of low status. The purity of the coinage was the responsibility of the farmer. Offenders had a hand struck off and those who minted illegally without licence were condemned to death. The largest mints were established in the eastern half of the country, the most prosperous part: London, York and Lincoln were major centres, the only large mint in the west was at Chester which was largely involved in the trade across the Irish Sea. It is clear that the number of coins produced at any one centre was a direct reflection of the volume of trade carried on there. The silver came from the melting down of foreign coins and the superseded English pennies that were handed in for exchange. The profit for the moneyer came from the discount that he took on these exchanges. It seems that this was not a fixed discount, moneyers could fix their own rate so that there was competition even in coin production.
There was no call for gold currency on the home market after the seventh century although gold retained its value vis-à-vis silver and it has been calculated that the ratio was 9:1 in the reign of Offa, 10:1 at the beginning of the ninth century and 11:1 in the reign of Athelstan.
In Northumbria coins made of an alloy of copper, zinc and silver were produced. They were called stycas and were struck during the eighth and ninth centuries. During the Viking period in Yorkshire after 867 moneyers from London were employed to introduce the silver penny which became commoner when the Yorkshire kingdom was re-absorbed into England.
Payment by notional pounds became frequent from the beginning of the ninth century. These pounds were reckoned to be equal in value to 240 silver pennies. In the second half of the tenth-century a notional twelve-penny shilling appears to be the norm in eastern England and it was reckoned that there were twenty shillings to a notional pound, not that either of these denominations appeared in the form of actual coins. Further north another system of high-value accounting appeared with the Scandinavian settlement. Its basic unit was the mark which was divided into eight sections or ores which later on began to be thought of as equal to the English pound.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries the rule was that no coin was to be struck outside a burh where production could be regularly checked by the king’s reeve. This was the situation at the Conquest when the system was fully developed and it demonstrates how the mature arrangement was expected to work. Even though the silver penny may not have been much used in all the multifarious minor transactions that took place in a local market where barter was still common, the exchanges were all related to the idea of a scale of values expressed in a currency of which the silver penny was the universally accepted expression of a certain value. Silver currency was also universal in Europe from the late-seventh century to the thirteenth and to a large extent it helped to lubricate the trade of the whole region which was in essence in those days what we would describe as a common market albeit with certain idiosyncratic rules in some countries.
Viking use of coins was sophisticated. On their overseas travels they were accustomed to dealing with a variety of currencies and wherever they went they founded trading stations like those in Ireland and Russia where these currencies circulated. They carried with them portable bronze balances that fitted into neat bronze cases that are sometimes found in their graves and with these they used to weigh out silver coins. Hoards of coins are found wherever they travelled, along the Russian rivers and in western Europe, and demonstrate the contribution these people made to the dissemination of coinage.
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