British Numismatic Society

The full programme is as follows:

09.30: Venue opens. Refreshments available from 10.00
10.30-10.40: Welcome from Dr. Elina Screen, President
10.40-11.10: Anni Byard, Iron Age and early Roman coin hoards from North Wales and the Welsh Marches
11.10-11.40: Philip Wise, ‘1066 and all that': A hoard of 11th century coins from Braintree, Essex
11.40-12.10: Dr Barrie Cook, Trauma and transformation: the context of the 2019 Hambleden hoard and other finds of c.1344-56
12.10 -12.20: Discoveries session – Discussion
 
12.20 – 13.45: Lunch

13.45-14.30: Philippa Pearce, OBE, Not just coins in a pot – Interpreting hoards at the British Museum
14.30-15.00: Dr Murray Andrews, Counting the pennies: statistical approaches to coin hoarding

15.00-15.20: Comfort Break. Refreshments available

15.20-15.50: Robert Page, MCHBI – an online tool to assist with the study of medieval coin hoards
15.50-16.20: Prof. Chris Howgego, The Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project
16.20-16.30: Interpretation session – Discussion
16.30-16.45: Panel Discussion – Summary of key points and discussion led by Session Chairpersons
16.45-16.50:  Closing Comments 
 
Profiles of speakers and their papers:
 
Anni Byard
 
Hoards from Eastern Britain have done much to help us understand the relationship between British Iron Age societies and the Roman Empire, along with the impact of the Roman conquest after 43 AD. The same cannot be said for Wales, which features strongly in the later stages of the Roman conquest, with a lack of hoards of Iron Age and Roman coins dating to before 96 AD. This paper will focus on recent hoards from north Wales and the Marches of Celtic and Roman coins from this period, which are helping remedy this. It will consider their context, recovery, content and offer some initial thoughts on what they add to our knowledge. 
 
Anni Byard is an archaeologist specialising in metal ‘small’ finds. She has an undergraduate degree in archaeology from the University of Liverpool and a masters in landscape archaeology from the University of Oxford. She worked in commercial archaeology for several years before joining the Portable Antiquities Scheme as the Finds Liaison Officer for Oxfordshire and West Berkshire in 2008. Anni left the PAS in 2019 to undertake her PhD. She currently works part-time for Oxford Archaeology South as their small finds specialist.
 
Philip Wise

An exceptionally rare and historically important hoard of early medieval coins was recently discovered in north-east Essex. Known as the Braintree Hoard, it comprises 142 silver pennies dating from the reigns of Edward the Confessor and Harold II. The hoard was buried in the early autumn of 1066, at around the time of the Battle of Hastings. The Braintree hoard is the first of its kind from the east of England to which a 1066 deposition date can be assigned. Exceptionally, it also includes two silver Byzantine coins. This paper will provide an overview of the research undertaken on the hoard in conjunction with Dr Gareth Williams, Curator of Early Medieval Coinage at the British Museum. It will consider the reasons why the hoard might have been buried and the evidence from Domesday Book for land ownership in the area where the hoard was found. The paper will also look at how the hoard has increased our knowledge of the mints at Colchester, Ipswich and Sudbury, and its potential for the future of our understanding of coin production and usage at the time of the Norman conquest.
 
Philip Wise is a museum curator, archaeologist and historian. He has worked in a variety of local authority museums since 1983 and has been at Colchester for almost 25 years, initially as Curator of Archaeology and more recently as Heritage Manager. He is responsible for Colchester’s archaeological sites and monuments, and was one of the team who worked on the re-development of Colchester Castle from 2012 to 2014. Amongst his extensive list of publications are several on numismatics, including coin hoards and single coin finds from Warwickshire and Essex. He has also worked in a voluntary capacity for a number of national organisations, including Arts Council England, the Council for British Archaeology and the Society for Museum Archaeology. He is the current chair of Museums Essex.
 
Dr Barrie Cook
 
The mid-14th century in England was a time of great economic and monetary challenge. The English coinage had moved to a bi-metallic standard with the introduction of a regular gold coinage, initially falteringly, and then successfully in 1344. A few years later, in 1349, the Black Death dramatically reduced the population by between one third and one half, challenging the social and economic order. The 2019 Hambleden hoard and other finds from this period offer an insight into the transformation of the currency amid the trauma of the Black Death. The speaker will look at the Hambleden hoard and other similar finds, examining the evidence they provide of this challenging and traumatic time in English history.
 
Dr Barrie Cook has been Curator of Medieval and Early Modern coinage in the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum since 1985. He has published widely in his area of specialism and curated many numismatic exhibitions, as well as contributing to many more general exhibitions at the BM and elsewhere. He was curator of the major BM exhibition Germany: memories of a nation and adapted it for subsequent revivals in Berlin and Copenhagen. He was also the curator for Neil MacGregor’s four Radio 4 series. He has been editor of the British Numismatic Journal and secretary of the Royal Numismatic Society and is currently treasurer of the UK Numismatic Trust.  
 
Philippa Pearce, OBE
 
The careful recovery of coin hoards is essential not just to preserve their contents but also to ensure the information contained in the ordering of the deposition is recovered in a scientific and accurate manner. The British Museum has become a world-leading centre for such skills, enabling numismatists, archaeologists and historians to secure information from hoards that was not previously available. This paper will provide an introduction to their work, covering the British Museum involvement with the Treasure process and the part that conservators play in this. It will then describe the techniques used and the thinking behind them. The final part will focus on a few recent case studies concerning Roman, early medieval and Civil War coin hoards.
 
Philippa Pearce is the senior conservator in the Department of Collections Care at the British Museum. She is the longest serving full-time member of staff at the Museum. Her work also includes putting on exhibitions, arranging loans and dealing with storage issues. Externally, she has extensive experience as a conservator on archaeological excavations in Italy, Albania and Sudan. In recent years the Museum’s part in in the Portable Antiquities Scheme has formed an increasing part of her workload, with approximately 15,000 coins a year being cleaned for identification. Philippa was awarded the OBE in June 2018 for services to metal conservation.
 
Dr Murray Andrews
 
The rise of hobbyist metal detecting has created a golden age of coin hoard discoveries, and recent years have seen dozens of new medieval examples unearthed from the fields of England and Wales. How can we best make sense of this numismatic ‘big data’? Drawing on recent research, this talk examines how statistical techniques can help us understand patterns in the formation, deposition and recovery of medieval coin hoards, shedding new light on coin hoarding as a socio-economic phenomenon in the Middle Ages.
 
Murray Andrews is Associate Professor of Numismatics at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. He was awarded the Blunt Prize in 2020 for services to British numismatics, and his recent book Coin Hoarding in Medieval England and Wales, c.973-1544: Behaviours, motivations, and mentalités was shortlisted for the International Association of Professional Numismatists' 2019 Book Prize
 
Robert Page
 
The Society introduced an online facility in November 2022 which allows users to see the geographic distribution of medieval coin hoards in Britain and Ireland (MCHBI), and to filter those hoards to a particular period of interest. The underlying database provides an online summary for each hoard, and details, with hyperlinks, to relevant references. Reports can easily be downloaded. MCHBI is an ongoing project with new data being continuously added, with the objective of making this the most comprehensive coin hoard dataset for the medieval period to 1544 AD. After a short introduction there will be a demonstration of the system.

Rob Page is the project coordinator for “MCHBI” and is the website officer for the BNS. A retired geoscientist, his numismatic interests are mainly in hammered British coins, and he specialises in the long cross issues of Henry III. He has many years industry experience in project management and in building databases with MS Access. 

Prof. Chris Howgego

Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire (CHRE) is a major long-term collaborative infrastructural project. It aims to promote the integration of numismatic data into broader research on the Roman economy. The project collects information about hoards of coinages in use in the Roman Empire between 30 BC and 400 AD. It also includes hoards of Roman coins from outside the Empire to investigate Rome's economic and cultural reach. All data is made freely available online. The 14,800 hoards currently documented contain over 5.8 million coins. The unparalleled quality and quantity of the data provide major opportunities both for traditional scholarship and for innovative interdisciplinary and diachronic studies. In this paper the speaker will provide an overview of the CHRE project and the capabilities being developed within it.
 
Chris Howgego is Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum of Art. He has been on the staff of the Ashmolean since 1988, initially as Curator of Greek and Roman coins, then as Acting Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room in 2005, and as Keeper in 2006. In addition to lecturing on Roman numismatics in the University of Oxford from 1988 until 2022, he was the Research Co-ordinator of the Ashmolean Museum from 2012 until 2020 and is the Director of the Coins Hoards of the Roman Empire project. He was Vice President of the Royal Numismatic Society for five years and is an Honorary Member of the Société Royale de Numismatique de Belgique, a Corresponding Member of the American Numismatic Society, and holds the bronze and silver medals of the Norwegian Numismatic Society.