The analyses discussed here are the first results from a research programme carried out in Oxford University under the auspices of the Institute of Archaeology, the Ashmolean Museum, and the Research Laboratory for Archaeology. The main purposes of the investigation are: -1. to determine the fineness of the gold imported, in the form of Byzantine and Continental Germanic coinages, into Anglo-Saxon England during the second half of the 6th and the first half of the 7th-centuries A.D.; 2. to contribute information about the gold, silver, and copper content of the 7th-century coinages of west and north-west Europe, which will assist in charting more precisely the stages of their progressive debasement from gold, through electrum, to silver; 3. to ascertain whether the gold used in 7th-century Anglo-Saxon jewellery was subject to comparable debasement; and 4. to discover whether the results of non-destructive (surface) analysis by X-ray are vitiated by surface enrichment of the alloys, and whether specific gravity readings obtained by weighing are uniformly reliable.
A R C H A E O M E T R Y 99south Gaul and north-east Spain, then the Ostrogoths who became masters of Italy towards the end of the 5th-century, and then the Burgundians, began issuing their own 'pseudo-imperial' currencies. In the early 6th-century, the Franks in northern Gaul, under their Merovingian King Clovis, defeated both Visigoths and Burgundians, but continued, and thereafter greatly extended, the production of gold coinage, setting up mints all over Gaul, and also in the Rhineland. This Frankish currency seems to have been supported mainly by imports of Byzantine gold, a tangible expression of Imperial interest in the by now Catholic Merovingian kingdoms, Neustria, Austrasia, etc., which began at the end of the 5th-century and gathered in volume during thc reign of Justinian I (527-65) and his immediate successors.In the course of the 6th-century some of this gold found its way north, by way of Gaul and the Rhineland, into Frisia and England From the finds of Byzantine, Merovingian and Visigothic coins in England, mostly preserved as pendants, it would appear that the Anglo-Saxons received little share in the gold supply before the second half of the century, and that even then its distribution was largely confined to Kent.' The objects buried as grave-goods in the Kentish cemeteries make it clear that the marriage of King Ethelbert (c. with the daughter of the Merovingian King Charibert of Paris (p. 105) was not an isolated event, but was the political acknowledgement of a pre-existing cross-Channel intercourse, no doubt partly commercial in character, which had already made Kent the richest of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and was to ensure to it a continuing prosperity for many decades to come. Even in Kent, however, gold was not generally available for use in personal ornaments till near the end of the 6th-century, and only in the first half of the 7th-century did it begin to appear at all frequently in other parts of England. It seems to have b...
