Canadians celebrate it. Indigenous people curse its memory. Americans forgot about it. And the British, having burned down the White House, are just amused by it! The War of 1812 represented an inflection point in the history of North America, a multi-front war that tested the promise and wisdom of the adolescent American experiment. Though little more than a draw militarily, the survival of the United States represented a substantial victory for the new nation. The United States government celebrated their fortune with more official medal types for this three-year conflict than any other war, including the American Revolution. This lecture will examine the American military and naval medals issued during the War of 1812, British-issued commemorative and campaign medals related to the war, and medals that fit into the often-overlooked Anglo-native conflict that underscored the entire episode. 
 
John Kraljevich is one of America’s leading professional numismatists widely consulted by institutions, private collectors and professional colleagues. A popular long time instructor at the American Numismatic Association’s annual Summer Seminar, the ANA named John an Honorary Doctor of Numismatics in 2015, awarded him the Numismatist of the Year honour in 2016, and recognized his dedication to the hobby with the Glenn Smedley Award in 2011. As the cataloguer of some of the most legendary cabinets ever sold at auction, John’s research and writing has received the highest honours from the Numismatic Literary Guild and other organizations. John is an annual contributor to A Guide Book of United States Coins, and has contributed to many numismatic reference books. Among the institutions he has advised are the Smithsonian, Colonial
Williamsburg, the Massachusetts Historical Society and Monticello.

This year, the Bank of England Museum opened a new exhibition exploring the Bank of England's institutional links to transatlantic slavery. It explores the links between slavery and the Bank through the private business of early Bank officials, and the Bank's place in the wider financial system of the time. It also highlights the Bank's ownership of two sugar plantations in the late 1700s and the enslaved people who worked there. This talk looks at the key themes of the exhibition, with an additional focus on the numismatic material. 

Jennifer Adam is the Curator at the Bank of England Museum. Her work involves research and caring for numismatic, art and social history collections, in order to link their stories to people's lives today through displays and exhibitions. Before joining the Bank of England, Jennifer worked at the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum.

Traditionally, Iron Age and Roman numismatics and archaeology have been the preserve of period specialists, with little cross over. Different theoretical views between Iron Age and Roman coin deposition highlights the disparities in approach to each period’s material culture and archaeology and offers an opportunity to address some prevailing questions surrounding coin use in Iron Age Britain, and the impact of Rome, through a mix of landscape (macro-scale) and contextual (micro-scale) analysis. How were coins hoarded in Britain during the late Iron Age? Did the Roman invasion of AD 43 and the introduction of the Roman monetary system have any impact on hoarding? This talk will introduce Anni’s PhD research and present some early results on the Iron Age to Roman transition in Britain from the perspective of coin hoards, an AHRC funded project between the University of Leicester and the Ashmolean Museum. 

Anni Byard is an archaeologist specialising in metal ‘small’ finds. She has an undergraduate degree in archaeology from the University of Liverpool and a master’s in landscape archaeology from the University of Oxford. Anni 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.

All silver pennies minted in England from the early 970s to the thirteenth century carried the name of the individual responsible for manufacture, the moneyer, together with the location where they produced the coin. In the period down to 1100, this amounts to some 2,000 moneyers and over 120 mint-places. The role and status of these moneyers are matters of considerable importance for interpreting not only the coinage, but the economic and institutional structures of eleventh-century English society. Yet precious few direct textual references to moneyers survive. This paper seeks to develop understanding of the moneyers as a group by seeing how many of them probably or possibly appear in Domesday Book: a major survey of landholding society in England as of 1066 and 1086. The results shed important light on the wealth and social connections of moneyers.

Rory Naismith is Professor of Early Medieval English History in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

As a private coinage, with over 10,000 issuing ‘authorities’, 17^th century trade tokens give wonderful insights into the individual and personal. They can also be used to explore bigger questions about how the economy of 17^th century England and Wales was changing. Detailed examination of individual types will be combined with a broader overview to examine how tokens, and their issuers, were engaged in promoting, and shaping, new goods, new ways of working and new commercial and monetary relationships.

Laura Burnett is currently undertaking an AHRC funded PhD at the University of Exeter examining how people in the mid-17^th century used and understood trade tokens. She is an archaeologist by background, with a specialisation in archaeological small finds and numismatics, and previously worked for the Portable Antiquities Scheme in Sussex and Somerset. 

In 1775 and 1776 two halves of the British Empire went to war with distinctly different monies or monetary regimes. The main difference between them, as revealed by new evidence from the legal record, is one of time. The American regime was based on temporary monies designed to be burned after several years of circulation - literally money to burn - while Britain’s system relied on an ostensibly permanent money with no expiration date. Exploring the contrast between temporary and permanent monies, in turn, suggest new avenues for approaching the problem of monetary heterogeneity in the early modern world and our increasingly complicated monetary present. 

Dr Edwards is the Lecturer in Early American History at the University of St. Andrews. He previously served as the Sawyer Fellow in the Empire and Currency: Race, Monetary Policy, and Power project at the New School for Social Research and Career Development Fellow in the Global History of Capitalism at Brasenose College, Oxford. 

With the success of the anti-counterfeiting campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, and with soaring sales, the sovereign proves to be hugely successful in international markets. But threats loom on the horizon for the famous gold coin as other countries seek to enter the bullion market with their own gold pieces.  As the winds of change blow through the market, can the sovereign fight off the competition and continue to thrive? The return of proof sovereigns and the development of another icon, the gold Britannia, all owe their origins to Britain’s fight to maintain its market share in an increasingly competitive international market.

Chris Barker read History at the University of York where he also completed an MA in Cultural Heritage Management in 2011. In 2012 he began working as Assistant Curator at the Royal Mint Museum. He regularly gives talks and has spoken on topics as varied as the Royal Mint during the First World War through to the introduction of the £1 coin. He continues to work at the Museum as Information and Research Manager and is currently researching the role of the sovereign in post-war Europe.

This BNS day-long Symposium will focus on recent hoards from the British Isles, looking at their composition and deposition, and the new historical evidence they are providing. It will also explore the potential of hoard data now available online, and new ways to interpret the hoard record.

More details in due course.

Almost all collections of Indian coins in museum have a 'detritus'. These are seemingly crude, unattractive pieces of copper, often with pseudo-inscriptions and symbols, which are considered a curator's nightmare because they cannot be satisfactorily identified, attributed or classified, thereby not yielding to usual numismatic methodologies. Consigned to the 'miscellaneous and unattributed' category they are often forgotten. However, they tell fascinating historical stories - of legitimacy, sovereignty, trade and commerce and in general, the economic basis of the processes of Colonization. But to see them as such requires methods which go against the normal numismatic grain. This talk will highlight the importance of such 'unofficial' copper coins for aspects of social, economic and political history of India, on the cusp of British colonization in early 19^th century.

Shailendra Bhandare is Assistant Keeper, South Asian and Far-eastern Numismatics and Paper Money Collections, a Fellow of St Cross College and a member of Faculty of Oriental Studies. He started his career as a Numismatist with a visiting fellowship at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. He was then appointed as a post-doctoral fellow of the Society for South Asian Studies, and worked as a curator in the British Museum on the coins of Later Mughals and the Indian Princely States. He was appointed as curator of coins in the Ashmolean Museum in 2002. 

He was born and brought up in Mumbai, India where he received his first degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences. He holds a Masters degree in History and a Doctorate in Ancient Indian Culture awarded by the University of Mumbai.

This paper presents some early findings from her research which focuses on analysis of a variety of assemblages of Northumbrian material, from hoarded contexts, excavated sites to locations associated with Viking Great Army. Her analysis has a particular focus on the extensive derivative issues. Her work is funded by the White Rose Consortium for the Arts & Humanities.

Lucy Moore is currently undertaking her PhD research project at the University of York, in partnership with the Yorkshire Museum.

From ancient times Britain and Ireland have been very aware of their island character, but the seas around the British Isles have always connected as much as divided. People, objects and ideas – including coins and the concept of coinage – have all travelled to and fro. Indeed, coin finds offer important evidence for these movements and contacts. This series of lectures will explore the contacts and influences on coin use in Britain in the first millennium, taking an approach inspired by global history, which sees the sea as a space of connectivity. The second lecture will explore coin use among traders and others around the North Sea, focusing in particular on the seventh and eighth centuries, when the early pennies or sceattas circulated actively around the coasts of Britain and its North Sea neighbours.

Elina Screen is a college lecturer in medieval history at Trinity College, Oxford, general editor of the Medieval European Coinage project and President of the British Numismatic Society. Her numismatic interests include coin use in the Viking age and the Ilchester mint.