INTERVIEW DR MURRAY ANDREWS

We recently spoke to University of Worcester lecturer Murray Andrews, author of the recently published Coin Hoarding in Medieval England and Wales, c.973-1544, and asked him how the academic study of coins informs our history and influences the hobby

How did you become involved in numismatics?

I first got interested in numismatics as an undergraduate student at the Institute of Archaeology in London. I had just spent the summer excavating the Roman fort at Caerleon, and finding coins on the site naturally made me want to learn more about them. So, when term time came around, I immediately signed up for Kris Lockyear’s classes on Roman coinage. This was definitely one of the better decisions I’ve ever made: it gave me an opportunity to learn from some of the greats in the field, including Andrew Burnett, John Casey, Adi Popescu, and of course Kris himself. By the end of the course I was well and truly hooked, and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with ancient and medieval coins ever since: first as a museum professional, then as a finds archaeologist, and now as a university academic.

How do you think the academic study of numismatics works alongside the hobby of collecting coins?

Academic numismatists and coin collectors have many things in common: we’re all fascinated in coins and the stories they tell, and most of us recognise their basic value as windows into the past. Though we sometimes travel on parallel tracks, both sides have a lot to offer the other. Academic research generates new knowledge about coins and the worlds they inhabited, and this helps collectors to appreciate and understand the coins they own. Collectors, meanwhile, often make their coins available as the ‘raw material’ of academic study, and their eye for the unusual and unique can sometimes bring important coins to scholarly attention. In my specialist field, late medieval and early modern coinage, there’s a long history of co-operation and collaboration between academics and collectors, and I think that the discipline is much richer for it.

How do you explore coinage in your teaching?

Coins are an important part of the archaeological record, so feature prominently in my teaching at the University of Worcester.

In my undergraduate module ‘Medieval Archaeology and Local Heritage’, we use coins as a form of material evidence for the middle ages. When placed alongside the other sources – buildings, potsherds, animal bones, and so on – they can tell us a great deal about the medieval past, and provide a stepping stone to wider debates on the origins of states, the growth of towns and trade, and processes of culture change and identity formation. I also teach 2nd-year undergraduate classes on archaeological numismatics. These are hands-on sessions designed to develop practical skills in identifying, cataloguing, and analysing coins found on archaeological sites: they often give students their first ever opportunity to handle and examine ancient and medieval coins.

What prompted you to write about medieval coin hoards and what does the book reveal?

My book, Coin Hoarding in Medieval England and Wales, c.973-1544, is the outcome of my doctoral research at University College London, which was funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. The research aimed to produce a new synthesis of coin hoarding in the middle ages, prompted in particular by a rapid growth in the number of hoards found by metal detectorists and reported through the Treasure Act 1997. It also sought to develop the methodological foundations of medieval numismatics, using a range of previously-unutilised computational techniques to ask quite complex questions of numismatic ‘big data’. The book, I think, achieves these aims quite well: it provides a comprehensive account of coin hoarding as a medieval socio-economic phenomenon, based on a robust statistical analysis of the largest corpus of medieval hoards ever assembled for this region.

Much of the information that I present in the book strengthens the traditional idea that hoarding is an economic phenomenon, in which individuals gather together their monetary wealth and hide it away for temporary safekeeping. For example, I show that the distribution of hoards strongly correlates with the distribution of medieval towns, roads, and individually-lost coins, but has an equivocal relationship to the distribution of population and documented estate wealth. In other words, the pattern of hoards isn’t just an artefact of ‘where people lived’, or ‘where wealth was concentrated’, but has a clear and very specific association with commercial activity: this means that we’re hard-pressed to understand coin hoarding outside of its monetary context. However, the analyses I present sometimes force us to kill sacred cows. For example, the idea that hoards reflect war and violence is shown to have little, if any, explanatory power, and is directly contradicted by other patterns in the data we have. The book contains many other important discoveries, so is well worth a read.

Is the book useful to those collecting medieval coins?

I hope so! At its core, the book is an exploration of how medieval people used coins, so will help collectors to better understand the historic functions of the objects that they own today. Since coin hoards are in many respect private collections in their own right, a few collectors might even find themselves reflected in the hoard record: cabinets and safe-boxes filled with old coins are not a modern invention, after all.

Murray’s book is published by BAR Publishing. Find out more and claim a special 30% discount by visiting the ‘Festival of Coins’ pages on the allaboutcoins.co.uk website, where you can also watch an exclusive video presentation from Dr Andrews: www. allaboutcoins. co.uk/festival/ hidden-treasurescoin-hoarding-inmedieval-europe