period, and we shall find that though the £. was equivalent to 208., and the s. to 12d., yet the £. represented the livre or franc, about 10d. of our money, the s. was the sou, about one halfpenny, and the d. the denier or one-twelfth of that amount. There is, indeed, no need to cross the Channel to find an instance of depreciation to an almost equal extent, for at the time of the union of Scotland with England, at the beginning of the 17th century, the pound Scottish was the equivalent of twenty English pence, and the Scottish shilling and the English penny were practically one and the same amount. We shall, however, have an opportunity later on of tracing some of the stages of gradual depreciation in the value of coins which all along retained the same name. I must now attempt to make you acquainted with the origin and development of our three principal English units of the coinage, and will begin with the eldest of the three-the_penny. Although this coin has always in Latin received the name of denarius, yet any immediate connection between the denarius of Roman times and the penny of Saxon date can hardly be traced. The denarius which, under the Roman Commonwealth and the earlier Emperors, had been a silver coin weighing about 60 grains, and of about eightpence intrinsic value, had, under the Lower Empire, dwindled to a copper coin, though silver coins reappeared under different denominations. As its name implies, the denarius represented originally ten smaller pieces which were known as asses, but about 217 B.C. it was decreed that the denarius should pass for sixteen asses and not for ten. This was, no doubt, partly because the basis of all accounts was the as, which even at that early date had been reduced to about one-twelfth of its original weight, but it was also probably in part due to the greater convenience of having as the unit of the coinage a piece susceptible of being constantly halved, to one which was only divisible by five and by two. For the as itself, the duodecimal system, which permitted of division by two, three, four and six, was adopted, the defective nature of a purely decimal system when applied to the ordinary purposes of life, as distinct from arithmetical calculations, having been recognised by all the civilised nations of antiquity. But to return to our penny, the first mention of which as a coin is said to occur in the laws of Ina, king of the West Saxons, who began to reign in A.D. 688. In Saxon the word is spelt * penig or pening; but it also is found as pending, which is regarded as a diminutive of pand, a pledge; so that penny would appear to mean a little pledge or "token." Another view connects the word with the Latin pendere, to weigh. Whatever the derivation of the name, the penny in Saxon times meant a silver coin equal to the of a pound which weighed about 1 Skeat's Etym. Dict. 8.v. 5,760 grains. The weight of a penny was, therefore, twenty-four grains, which still in our tables constitute a dwt., or pennyweight. In those early days the purchasing power of those 24 grains of silver was far larger than at present. In the time of King Ethelred, about A.D. 1000, an ox was valued at 30d., a sheep at 12d., and a pig at 9d., and at even later dates lower values are recorded. * The silver of which the pennies were made was what is still known as sterling, or of even greater purity; and this word "sterling" is not without interest. It is beyond doubt the same word as Easterling, and has been thought to refer to certain Easterlings, or men from the East, who at some early, though uncertain period, had the English coinage under their charge. It seems, however, possible, notwithstanding the authority of the old Monk of Bury, who speaks of these Easterns, that the term refers to the purity of those eastern pieces of silver, the early Arab coins, which found their way to the west, and are so constantly present in the hoards of Anglo-Saxon coins found in this country, and in those which were buried in Scandinavia by the Danish pirates who once infested our shores and carried off what spoil they could find. The proportions of pure metal and alloy in every pound of sterling silver are— 11 oz. 2 dwts. silver. At first sight these proportions seem quite arbitrary, but on examination it will appear that the alloy constitutes exactly three parts out of forty, or is present to the extent of 7 per cent. It speaks well for the constancy of the English character that during the whole period of our coinage, with the exception of a small portion of the sixteenth century, the standard of our silver currency has remained the same, though it must be confessed that even in England the weight of the silver penny has been reduced by about two-thirds. It was, as I have already observed, originally about twenty-four grains, though there is a considerable range in weight among the pennies of the same date, not improbably owing to the want of accurate scales in early days. Of this variation in weight there is a rather singular exemplification on record. In the reign of Edward III., one † Salamon de Ripple, a monk of the Abbey of St Augustine, of Canterbury, who appears to have acted as treasurer to the Abbey, devised a balance which he called a penny-pise. His system was simple. He selected twenty shillings in heavy pennies, and weighed against them all the money he received, and by this means those who thought to pay only twenty shillings were forced to pay five shillings more, or three shillings and fourpence at the • Walter de Pinchbeck. See Ruding, annals of the coinage, vol. I., p. 8. † See Ruding, op. cit. vol I., p. 211. least. At length a complaint was made from the whole diocese, the King interfered, and the Abbot was fined eighty pounds for the offence committed by his deputy, and was also obliged to refund what had been extorted in excess. It is, however, now time to turn to the penny itself and to trace its history downwards. At the period when first this coin was struck there was more than one king in England. It was, in fact, during the so-called Heptarchy, so that there is some difficulty in deciding which should be regarded as the earliest English penny, and which of our kings should have the credit of being the first to coin it. On the whole, I think that Offa, king of Mercia, from A.D. 757 to 796, has the best claim to being the originator of the penny. Not but what there were numerous coins struck in England before his time, but these in the north were little pieces of brass or silver, or a mixed metal, probably obtained by melting down Roman coins for reminting, such as are known as stycas or "bits," while in the south the usual coins were of silver, and lighter in weight than the penny. These were known as sceattas, and their name still survives in our language, though we do not always recognise it when we are called upon to " pay our shot." The kingdom of Mercia in Offa's time comprised a large portion of central England, and nearly all the smaller states, East Anglia, Essex, Kent and Sussex, were brought more or less completely under his power. Among his public works may be mentioned the foundation of the Abbey of St. Albans. His coins are numerous, though they are now by no means common, and some of them have their inscriptions in whole or in part written in the old Saxon or Runic characters, which are allied to the Roman letters though materially different in appearance. Others of his coins have complicated and elegant designs upon them, and there appears to be some attempt at portraiture when his head is placed upon the pennies. For it must not be forgotten that in old times there was not that dreary uniformity which now prevails in the coinage of all countries. Certain moneyers used to be appointed, whose business it was to strike the coins of the proper weight and fineness, but as to design, a great deal was left to individual enterprise. Of Offa, for instance, there are some forty or fifty varieties of type still extant, some with his head and some without, and some even with the name of the moneyer placed by the side of the king's head, whose name and title appear on the reverse. Although, as already observed, the pennyweight was properly twenty-four grains, or as we shall subsequently see 22 grains troy, yet forty of Offa's pennies when weighed gave an average of only eighteen grains, and when newly coined they probably did not exceed twenty grains in weight. The penny which I have chosen as an illustration of Offa's (Fig. 1) coinage bears on the obverse an elegantly formed cross, between FAR. On the the arms of which appears the legend. reverse appears the name of the moneyer or mint master, Alhmund, in two lines with a cross above it, the whole within a kind of frame or compartment. There are one or two points in regard to the lettering, to which it is worth while to direct your attention for a moment. First the doubling of the letter F by means of a horizontal line over it, a practice which remained in use until comparatively modern times. Second, the combination of the R and X into a monogram to represent the word REX. Third, the form of the A and U on the reverse, which, it will be observed, are almost identical with the small type letters a and u now in use, and which illustrate the manner in which the small Roman letters were developed. The D is more like our written d. There is, of course, no date on the coin, as the earliest English piece with a date is one that is supposed to have been struck for Perkin Warbeck, which bears the date 1494, in Arabic numerals. Nor is there any place of mintage given, as would have been the case had the coin belonged to a period two centuries later. For in Saxon times there were mints and moneyers, not only as now, in London, but all over the kingdom; often in comparatively small towns, as may be seen on looking over a list of the places, some seventy in all, at which the coins of Edward the Confessor were struck. But, notwithstanding the absence of date and place, I can give some reasons for assigning this particular penny to about the middle of Offa's reign, or say A.D. 780, and fixing its mintage at Canterbury. For, in the first place, the moneyer Alhmund, unlike many others of Offa's mint-masters did not strike any of the coins of his successor Coenvulf, who ascended the throne of Mercia in A.D. 794; and, in the second place, the peculiar compartment in which Alhmund's name is placed is identical with that in which Offa's own name appears on a coin of Jaenberht, Archbishop of Canterbury, A.D. 763 to 790. As it was not until 774 that the Mercians and the men of Kent fought at Otford, it could not have been until after that time that the Archbishop struck coins by the King's authority. The prominent position of the cross seems also to strengthen the probability of this penny having been struck at Canterbury. Alhmund also struck pennies with the head of Offa upon them. I must not, however, dwell longer on these numismatic details, but will skip over a period of a hundred years, and bring under notice a penny of the great Alfred, struck in this City of London. On this coin (Fig. 2) we have on the one side a portrait, let us hope not very life-like, of the king, with the legend ÆLFRED your REX, and on the reverse a monogram in which those skilled in such combinations will have no difficulty in deciphering the word LONDINIA. I possess a halfpenny of Alfred with the same reverse, but proportionately smaller. It is, probably, to this king that the credit of first striking halfpennies must be given, though he appears to have coined but very few. The names of Canterbury, Exeter, Gloucester, Lincoln, Oxford, and Winchester, as well as that of London, occur on Alfred's coins. Up to the time of Æthelstan, A.D. 925 it had been permitted to the Archbishops of Canterbury to strike money in their own names, and even with their own portraits, such as they were; but Ethelstan, though he continued the privilege of coining even to some of the bishops and abbots, in different parts of the country, enacted that all the money of the kingdom should be of but one kind, and it is now impossible to distinguish the coins issued from these ecclesiastical mints, from those struck under the more immediate authority of the King. It is needless for me to trace the descent of the penny through each of the reigns of our Saxon kings. Its weight was still theoretically about 22 grains, though practically the coins were often struck much below the standard weight. The Norman conquest produced but little or no effect on the English currency; in fact, many of the moneyers who had struck coins for Edward the Confessor and Harold, continued to exercise the same office for William the Conqueror, and hardly a moneyer's name which occurs on the Conqueror's coins is of other than English origin. The penny which I have selected as illustrating his coinage (Fig. 3), bears on the obverse the head of William, with the legend PILLMVS REX A, and on the reverse the name of the moneyer ELFPINE ON LVNDE. It will be observed that the Saxon form of W, a letter like the Roman P, is still maintained; and I may add that Elfwine had been a moneyer in the London mint in the preceding reigns, both of Harold and of Edward the Confessor. I have selected a coin from the London mint; but to give some farther idea of the number of mints in this country towards the end of the 11th century, I may mention that under the two first Williams, there were mints at not less than seventy-two English towns. This abundance of mints was probably rendered necessary by the difficulties of communication between one part of the kingdom and another; but, by the end of the 12th century, the number had been considerably reduced, for, under John, the recognised moneyers were confined to sixteen towns, as we know from a writ issued in 1208, summoning them all to Westminster, and ordering them to bring their dies with them. It is, however, a curious fact that no English coins are known bearing the name of John, and this was long a puzzle to numismatists. It is, however, now pretty clear that though this King's mints were well employed during his reign, the coins struck in them did not bear the name of John, |