monetisation in medieval england and wales - esshc 2018 · coins minted between 1180, when the...

Coin Evidence as a Proxy for Wage Labour in Medieval England and Wales

Spatial and Temporal Changes, 1066-1660

Preliminary short paper – ESSHC 2018

Rombert Stapel, International Institute of Social History

– Please do not cite –

Abstract

The rise of wage labour is considered one of the indicators for the transitional nature of the

late medieval economy in Northwest Europe and the emergence of capitalism. It is not

surprising therefore, that wage labour has attracted the interest of many economic historians.

There has been particular interest in wage levels, creating long time series of wage levels in

various parts of medieval Europe. Regional variations of these wage levels are often studied

to research (labour) market integration.

While such time series are incredibly informative, they are not an indicator of the

number of people that worked for wages in a particular area, and to what extent wage

labourers were fully or partially dependent on the income from wages. Recently, an

alternative indicator was proposed for how many people worked for wages in a certain

country. This indicator is the level of small denomination coins per capita, worth a daily wage

or less.

In this study, I will examine to what extent small coin evidence, both archaeological

coin finds as well as coin production figures, can be used to study both spatial and temporal

variation in wage labour in late medieval England and Wales; and which intermediary steps

R.J. Stapel – Coin Evidence as a Proxy for Spatial and Temporal Changes in Wage Labour

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are necessary to come to such an evaluation. The spatial component is added at the end of

the paper and will be addressed in the presentation in more detail. The paper below is meant

as an accompanying piece that contains the steps taken to come to detailed monetisation

levels in medieval England and Wales over the course of several centuries.

Introduction

The idea behind using the availability of coins as a proxy for the presence of wage labour is

quite simple and elegant, and was further developed in recent years by Jan Lucassen.1 It builds

on the premise that the availability of ‘a substantial stock of currencies per capita in

circulation, consisting of denominations equalling the value of one hour or less of waged work’

in particular areas of the world can be used as an indicator for the presence of wage labour in

those areas. In areas where the per capita stock of these coins of small denominations is five

to ten times the prevailing wage level of a skilled worker, Lucassen argues, a level of ‘deep

monetisation’ is reached.2 The advantages of this approach are twofold. First, it offers a new,

consistent method to compare different regions of the world over time and space. Second, it

can be used to study areas of the world for which little or no data is available on the size of

the group of wage earners in society.

While Jan Lucassen has applied the method to various countries or larger regions in

Europe and Asia, there is no restriction on the geographical level of analysis, as long as a

meaningful number of coins in circulation per capita can be calculated. In this paper, I will use

1 J.M.W.G. Lucassen, ‘Deep Monetisation: The Case of the Netherlands 1200-1940’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 11 (2014) 73–122; J.M.W.G. Lucassen, ‘Deep monetization, commercialization, and proletarization. Possible links, India 1200-1900’ (Noida: V.V. Giri National Labour Institute 2014); J.M.W.G. Lucassen, ‘Deep Monetisation in Eurasia in the Long Run’, in: R.J. van der Spek and B. van Leeuwen eds., Money, Currency and Crisis: In Search of Trust, 2000 BC to AD 2000. Routledge Explorations in Economic History (Abingdon: Routledge 2018). 2 Lucassen, ‘Deep Monetisation: the Case of the Netherlands’, 73, 87.


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spatial and temporal spread of archaeological coin finds in medieval England and Wales to

reconstruct local spatial and temporal patterns of deep monetisation levels. I will focus on the

coins minted between 1180, when the English coinage was reformed and the short-cross

penny was introduced, and 1660. Finders of coins produced after that year are no longer

obliged to register their finds with the government. The proposed methodology can act as a

case study for other regions in the world.

Coin Finds and Production Figures

In order to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of the level of monetisation in a

particular region, in this case medieval England and Wales, we need to combine a number of

datasets and variables. The basis for further analysis are the archaeological coin finds. Not all

coins that were in circulation can of course be recovered through archaeological surveys. The

metal of coins can be – and often is – reused for all kind of purposes, including the production

of new coins. Coins that were not reused or brought back into circulation, may have been

hoarded or lost. Of these coin hoards and coin losses, only a fraction will have been found –

and only a fraction of those will have been registered. We have to rely on the ability and

willingness of archaeologists and detectorists to find and record coin losses.

In countries that both allow the finder to keep his coin finds (after registration), and in

which a good system for registering the finds is in place, there are great possibilities for

researchers to use the coin finds evidence for socioeconomic and labour history. Such laws

and registration systems are for instance in place in the Netherlands (the NUMIS database),3

but the most advanced and user-friendly system at the moment is the Portable Antiquities

3 De Nederlandsche Bank, ‘NUMIS Muntvondsten Database’ (1997-2013) <http://www.dnb.nl/over-dnb/nationale-numismatische-collectie/numis/index.jsp> [accessed 2 May 2016].


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Scheme (PAS) that registers archaeological finds – including coins – for England and Wales.4

Currently there are over 500,000 individual coins registered, mostly dating from the Iron Age

to the mid-seventeenth century5, as well as almost 1,000 coin hoards. On a daily average, 60

to 70 coins are added to the database.

Most of these coins have spatial coordinates attached to their records, but only

165,000 of these coordinates are publicly available. The spatial coordinates of the majority of

the records is concealed, to prohibit treasure hunters scanning the area for further artefacts.

In such cases, often only a parish or field name is recorded that can cover a couple of square

kilometres. For the purpose of this research, the publicly available data of the Portable

Antiquities Scheme was cleaned extensively and enhanced with an estimation of the spatial

coordinates – when absent. Wrong or missing delimiters were fixed, the spelling of

geographical names was harmonized, just like the names and estimated production dates of

the coins. The values of the denominations were harmonized wherever possible. In the end,

our adjusted dataset includes precise or approximate locations for 91% of all coin finds, a

significant increase from the publicly available coordinates.6 This means that there is a

substantial spatial coverage, that will make further analysis possible.

4 The British Museum, ‘Portable Antiquities Scheme’ (2013-2015) <http://finds.org.uk/> [accessed 2 May 2016]. 5 There is no obligation to report coin finds that were produced after 1660, so there is only a limited amount of modern coins included in the database. 6 All records that carried information on the parish or field or area name in which the coin was found, were given coordinates. Some coordinates are therefore not precise find locations, but center points of parishes. In those case in which only a district or county name is available, the spatial coordinates are only used for county or district aggregates.


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Figure 1. Production of pennies (1 d.) between 1279–1351.7

Coin Name Denomination Survival rate

Farthing ¼ d. 0.00411% One in 24.330 coins

Halfpenny ½ d. 0.00536% One in 18.666 coins

Halfpenny (1335–51) ½ d. 0.00288% One in 34.721 coins

Penny 1 d. 0.00299% One in 33.400 coins

Gold noble8 20, 40, or 80 d. 0.00211% One in 47.334 coins

Table 1. Coins produced in England between 1279 and 1351, compared to the concerned coins reported in the Portable Antiquities Scheme.9

For the short period between 1279 and 1351 it is possible to get some indication of the survival

rate for each denomination of medieval English coinage (Figure 1 and Table 1). For this

7 Sources: M. Allen, Mints and Money in Medieval England (Cambridge 2014) 410–415; The British Museum, ‘PAS’, version: 17 March 2018. 8 This includes the – more frequently minted – half noble and quarter noble. Based on the coin finds of 1279–1351, on average out of each pound sterling, around 7.63 gold coins were minted. This includes 0.72 full nobles (9% – or 24% per lb.), 2.20 half nobles (29% – or 37% per lb.), and 4.71 quarter nobles (62% – or 39% per lb.). Since the production figures for all three types of gold nobles are aggregated and presented in pounds sterling, we had to transpose the coin finds to pounds first and then make the calculations. 9 The production figures are available in: Allen, Mints and Money, 410–415. Undefined and foreign coinage of this period that was recovered is not included.

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purpose and because not all coin finds can be dated precisely, any date spans of the coins (e.g.

1307–27) are adjusted, where each year within this span is given a value of one divided by the

total span length: in this example each year gets a value of 1/21, or 0.0476. This allows us to

aggregate the year spans without producing duplicate counts.

It seems that gold coins are a little bit less likely to be retrieved than silver coins –

possibly because gold coins are more likely to be reused and less likely to be lost due to their

high value. One in 47.000 gold nobles, including half nobles and quarter nobles, is retrieved.

For pennies and farthings, roughly around one in every 20.000 to 35.000 coins produced is

reported in the Portable Antiquities Scheme database. The halfpennies show a slightly

different picture, with a particular high survival rate between 1292 and 1330. This probably

means that either the production figures for halfpennies are underreported, or the dates

reported in the PAS are incorrect. For the moment, a survival rate of one in 31.197 for small

silver coins (the average for all farthings, halfpennies, and pennies combined) seems

reasonable to us, especially as the survival rate does not vary that much throughout the period

1279–1351. Perhaps this figure can be further specified in the future, specifically regarding

whether this survival rate changes over longer periods of time (which is presumably a relevant

factor).

Length of Circulation Period

One of the other ways of interpreting this survival rate figure – which also adds temporal

depth – is by linking it to the length of the period a particular coin was in circulation. In order

to determine the per capita stock of coinage in circulation, we need to determine how long

coins remained in circulation since they were minted. In his study of the deep monetisation

levels in the Netherlands, Jan Lucassen used a ‘half-life’ of fifty years for copper coins –


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meaning that as a ‘rule-of-thumb’ after fifty years, half of the coins produced were removed

from circulation due to losses, hoarding, melting, and reminting. For silver and gold coins,

which may have been more prone to hoarding and melting, this half-life may have been

shorter. Lucassen mentions examples of twenty to thirty years.10 From the composition of

medieval English coin hoards, it becomes clear that it is not unusual to have pennies included

that were up to 150 years old at the time the coin hoard was created.11 Using the survival rate

of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century coins we calculated earlier and a ‘half-life’ of fifty years,

we can draw a hypothetical survival rate below (Figure 2). The rate decreases exponentially,

with 1.5% per year.

Figure 2. Hypothetical survival rate for medieval small coins. The area in grey is used to calculate the estimated number of coins in circulation at any given point.

10 Lucassen, ‘Deep Monetisation: the Case of the Netherlands’, 90. 11 For farthings and halfpennies such calculations cannot be made due to a lack of evidence. M.C. Allen, ‘The Interpretation of Single-Finds of English Coins, 1279-1544’, British Numismatic Journal 75 (2005) 50–62.

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Figure 3. Estimation of yearly small coin production (in pennies) per capita, based on the coin finds.

To apply this survival rate on the coin finds, we use the available coins dated in one particular

year (Figure 3) and combine these with all coins in the hundred years previous to that year.

This is done proportionally, using the expected loss of 1.5% per year (compare Figure 2).

Although after hundred years, still around 20% of the coins may be kept in circulation

according to the hypothetical survival rate above, the calculations are topped at hundred

years for simplicity. The end results are presented in Figure 4.

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Figure 4. Estimated number of small coins in circulation (in pennies) per capita (topped at hundred years after production). The figures are based on the coin finds in the PAS database.

Population Figures

For the moment, I have used the national and county estimates for the population of England

prepared by Broadberry et al.12 These were interpolated to produce yearly estimates. The

population of Wales was added by adding 7% to the population of England.13

12 S.N. Broadberry, B.M.S. Campbell and B. van Leeuwen, English Medieval Population: Reconciling Time Series and Cross Sectional Evidence (2010), there tables 4 and 6 (national data), and table 8 (county data) <https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/sbroadberry/wp/medievalpopulation7.pdf>. 13 This percentage is more or less stable throughout the years. Compare: G. Clark, ‘The long march of history: Farm wages, population, and economic growth, England 1209–1869’, Economic History Review 60 (2007) 97–135. I have use the data available at http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/English%20Data/England%20NNI%20-%20Clark%20-%202015.xlsx; B.M.S. Campbell, ‘Benchmarking medieval economic development: England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, c.1290’, Economic History Review 61 (2008) 896–945; J.C. Russell, British Medieval Population (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1948) 360–361.

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Coins worth a daily wage or less in circulation Coins worth an hourly wage or less in circulation


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Wage Levels and Hours Worked

Currently, I have used the nominal wage levels for skilled craft workers gathered by Gregory

Clark.14 Furthermore, for now, I have not taken into account changing patterns in the number

of work hours in a day. For the calculation, I presume there are eight work hours in a day, as

most wage series state the daily wage only. This also allows for good comparisons with the

deep monetisation levels created by Jan Lucassen for the Netherlands and several countries

in Europe and Asia.15

Due to the rising absolute wage levels in England from the thirteenth to the

seventeenth century, ever so often new coin denominations fall into the category of coins

worth an hourly wage or less. These coins are listed in Table 2.

The wage level between 1066 and 1209, the earliest year included by Gregory Clark, is

estimated to be static and the wage level in 1209 is used for all years. While this was most

certainly not the reality, it will not influence the deep monetisation levels too much, as

farthings, the only coin that matches the wage level of 1209, appear in this period in small

numbers – and in the form of a penny cut in quarters – only.

14 G. Clark, English prices and wages, 1209-1914 (Global Price and Income History Group, University of California – Davis 2006) <http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/files/England_1209-1914_(Clark).xls> [accessed 18 March 2018]. 15 Lucassen, ‘Deep Monetisation: the Case of the Netherlands’; Lucassen, ‘Deep Monetisation in Eurasia’.


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Figure 5. Nominal daily wage of a skilled craft worker.

Period Largest available denomination equalling hourly wage

[1066]–1357 ¼ d. (Cut farthing); Farthing (introduced 1216–47)

1358–1559 ½ d. (Cut halfpenny); Halfpenny (introduced 1216–47)

1560–1616 1 d. Penny; Threefarthing (¾ d.; introduced 1561–82)

1617–1651 1 ½ d. Threehalfpence (introduced 1561–82)

1652–1660 2 d. Halfgroat or twopence

Table 2. Largest available denominations in circulation equalling an hourly wage.

Deep and medium monetisation levels: yearly estimates and spatial patterns

To calculate the deep (and medium) monetisation levels, the figures in Figure 4 are divided by

the typical nominal wage level of a skilled worker in England, either by hour (deep

monetisation) or by day (medium monetisation). The end result is presented in Figure 6. Quite

pronounced are the three shifts around 1350–55 (coinciding with the Black Death), 1550–60

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(mid-Tudor crisis), and 1650–55; each time followed by long but slowly decreasing levels of

deep monetisation. All three volatile periods are associated with either sudden or more slowly

developing rising nominal wage levels, causing new denominations to be included in the

calculations (see Figures 7 (deep) and 8 (medium)). Immediate population changes, affecting

the per capita numbers, play a role as well, particularly of course after the Black Death.

It is also possible to calculate regional, county estimates for the deep and medium

monetisation levels. Here we have to combine the county population estimates by Broadberry

et al. with the spatial data of the coin finds gathered by the Portable Antiquities Scheme or

added by my own. It builds on the presumption that coins minted often in London or

Canterbury end up circulating, either immediately after production or more slowly through

use and payments, in regions with the highest demand for that type of coin. The results are

presented in Figures 9 to 11.

The hypothesis that I wish to test is that regions with high rates of wage labour are

characterised by high demand of small denomination coins. If correct, this means that spatial

and temporal patterns in deep monetisation levels can be used to estimate the number of

people working for wages in a particular time, at least for rural areas. Indeed, areas we know

have had relative high wage labour rates in the Middle Ages, such as Norfolk, Suffolk, and

Licnolnshire, generally show high deep monetisation levels (Figure 10). The exercise is

particularly useful for the many regions of medieval England where such rates are completely

unclear.16

16 Some rural wage labour rates for England, including references to literature, are listed by Bas van Bavel: B.J.P. van Bavel, ‘Rural wage labour in the sixteenth-century Low Countries: an assessment of the importance and nature of wage labour in the countryside of Holland, Guelders and Flanders’, Continuity and Change 21 (2006) 37–72, there 38 (note 2).


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In the coming year, I want to contextualise the outcomes of this paper, both in the

economic, monetary, and labour history of the British Isles, as well as adding comparisons to

other regions in the world. I will focus particularly on the reasons monetisation levels change

over time, and the possibilities of using these levels as a proxy for the presence of wage labour.

It might also be possible to help further define and/or sharpen the definition and premises of

‘deep’ and ‘medium’ monetisation levels.

Deep monetisation = ‘regular’ coin availability (valued one-hour wage skilled

worker or less) per capita. ‘Regular’ is approximated by

Jan Lucassen as 5 to 10 times the value of the prevailing

hourly wage.

Medium monetisation = ‘regular’ coin availability (valued full or half daily average

wage skilled worker) per capita

Figure 6. Monetisation levels in England and Wales, based on coin finds reported in the PAS database.

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Figure 7. Dissection of the deep monetisation level, per denomination.

Figure 8. Dissection of the medium monetisation levels per denomination.

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Farthing Halfpenny Threefarthing

Penny Threehalfpence Halfgroat / Twopence

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Farthing Halfpenny Threefarthing PennyThreehalfpence Halfgroat / Twopence Threepence Groat / FourpenceSixpence Shilling Twenty pence Two shilling


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Figure 9. Deep monetisation levels (in absolute figures) for the years 1086, 1290, 1377, and 1600 (from the top left, clockwise).


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Figure 10. Deep monetisation levels (relative to the other regions) for the years 1086, 1290, 1377, and 1600 (from the top left, clockwise).


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Figure 11. Medium monetisation levels (relative to the other regions) for the years 1086, 1290, 1377, and 1600 (from the top left, clockwise).


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Figure 12. Ratio of Medium to Deep Monetisation Levels for the years 1086, 1290, 1377, and 1600 (from the top left, clockwise).

monetisation in medieval england and wales - esshc 2018 · coins minted between 1180, when the...

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