Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/78

76 "that no evidence has yet been adduced to prove that the Anglo-Saxons struck any gold money; but that the balance of probability apparently inclines to the determination that no such money was issued from their mints." By others the mancus is supposed to have been of gold; and Mr. Turner thinks that both gold and silver were used in exchanges in an uncoined state. It is certain that mention is repeatedly made of payments in gold. It is agreed that the penny, the halfpenny, the farthing, and the triens (if that was a coin) were all of silver; and that the styca was of copper, or of that metal with an alloy. In fact, no Saxon coins have yet been discovered except some of those last mentioned. Of pennies and stycas some large hoards have been found within these few years. In April, 1817, a wooden box was turned up by a ploughman in a field near Dorking, in Surrey, which contained nearly seven hundred Saxon pennies, principally of the coinages of Ethelwulf, the son and successor of Egbert, and of Ethelbert, the father of Alfred, but partly also of those of preceding kings of Wessex, of Mercia, and of East-Anglia. Eighty-three silver coins of King Ethelred, and two of his father, King Edgar, were found in 1820, by a peasant while digging a woody field in Bolstads Socked, in Sweden, and are now deposited in the Royal Cabinet of Antiquities at Stockholm.Turner's Anglo-Saxons, ii. 480. And in 1832, a brass vessel containing about eight thousand stycas, principally of the kings of Northumberland, was found at Hexham in that county. About five thousand of them were recovered from the persons into whose hands they had fallen; and a selection of about three hundred of them is now in the British Museum.