Scales and Weights in Early Anglo-Saxon England

Units of Account in Gold and Silver in Seventh-Century England:Scillingas, SceattasandPæningas

“…Note also Scull's observation that a weight difference of c 0.2g seems to be the smallest that could be estimated with accuracy using this weighing equipment : Scull 1990, 188. Note also Scull's observation that a weight difference of c 0.2g seems to be the smallest that could be estimated with accuracy using this weighing equipment : Scull 1990, 188.…”

“…Scull 1986 and 1990. It has not been possible here to incorporate details of a more recent find from further excavations at Buckland, Dover, Kent, grave 265.…”

“…Multiples of the lighter weight-module (1.30-1.33g) in the six principal weight-sets (afterScull 1990) …”

Social and economic complexity in early medieval England: a central place complex of the East Anglian kingdom at Rendlesham, Suffolk

“…Rendlesham was a place to which coin flowed disproportionately from the later sixth to the earlier eighth centuries, and it would appear that the gold coinage was circulating as currency and not just as bullion or raw material for the jeweller. Coin weights marked with contemporary Byzantine denominations, cut coins, blanks and ingots, and a gilded silver forgery of a Merovingian tremissis ; all suggest a system in which the gold coins were recognised as units of account that might need to be checked for weight and fineness, but where payments might also be made in equivalent weights of uncoined bullion (Steuer 1987; Scull 1990). The socially restricted circulation of gold currency provides a monetary context for high-value long-distance exchange.…”

Europe Between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Recent archaeological and historical research in Western and Southern Europe

“…In some ways this is a powerful model. Ian Wood has indeed argued that parts of southern England were subject to Merovingian hegemony in the sixth century (Wood, 1983(Wood, , 1992, and there are some aspects of material culture in Kent and the Upper Thames Valley in the sixth century which strongly suggest links with Merovingian Gaul (Hawkes, 1956;Evison, 1965;Dickinson, 1976;Hawkes, 1982;Scull, 1990). The unequal power relationship between societies of the centre and the periphery would establish, in emulation, a plausible context for the appropriation or construction of new identities, and the transmission of new cultural constructs and a new material vocabulary.…”