Item 1978/1 - Letter from Dorothy Whitelock

1 item, paper

Letter from Dorothy Whitelock, in manuscript, ten folios (recto & verso), dated 5 August 1978, thanking for IS for his very interesting paper. She makes one minor correction: Edward the Elder died in 924, she writes, not 925. She then takes issue with Sutherland's claim "that London was in a state of apostasy as long as 616-675". She asks IS's opinion on the attribution of a Northumbrian coin with the inscription +ALVVALDVS, which some numismatists want to assign to Alfred's nephew Æthelwold. She has no special wish to connect the coin with Æthelwold but wonders about the evidence that numismatists sometime use to date coins so precisely in this period. DW then turns to the mancus as a coin. In particular, she asks why Æthelstan claimed to have paid for three estates bought from his father with "mancuses by weight", because it implies that paying by tale would have been an inferior sum. She says that it is difficult to find instances in which references to mancuses unambiguously allude to actual coins, but there are plenty of references in which the term clearly refers to a weight in gold. She goes on the discuss a few of the references in some detail. Mancuses were struck for special religious purposes, but this was relatively rare, and she supposes that this affected their chances of survival and militated against them entering into lay possession. DW mentions Peter's pence, which was paid in pence (i.e. silver), but also notes other kinds of payment that tended to be in gold, such as the heriot, and some of the larger ones are stated in mancuses. She supposes that gold was considered to be a "suitable medium for a traditional ceremonial payment" but also might have been done in an equivalent value of silver. She nevertheless notes that there were provisions for making some large payments in kind – by slave, coat of mail, sword, etc. – and wonder whether this implies that it may have been difficult at times to raise enough coined money for large payments. She also asks whether the tendency to pay for land with valuable goods in kind might have also signalled a shortage of coin, providing many examples and noting that this practice was common in ninth-century Mercia, but she disputes that gold was all that scarce.