Anyone know of hoards that contained coins from different regions ?

Icollecteverything

I remember a story when a mans remains were excavated (not a grave?) and some coins were found with the body, maybe in a bag or purse. I think it was in Europe and the interesting thing was that the the coins came from several different regions, many miles apart. The theory was that the man was a traveler or trader.
Also wondering about the large hoards that are found are the coins usually from the same time or do they include older coins mixed in?

worldcoinguy

Interesting question. I will be watching to see what others add to the thread.

Nap

Viking hoards from around the 8th-11th centuries frequently include coins of England, France, Scandanavia, Germany, and Islamic territories.

For example, the great Cuerdale hoard:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/vikings/cuerdale_01.shtml

Nap

Also, the fantastic grave excavation at Sutton Hoo in England contained Merovingian Frankish coins, presumably because there were no English coins being made at that time. It is well known that coins travelled far.

A great find of Anglo-Saxon pennies was found in the early 20th century during excavations in Rome, Italy, almost certainly carried by pilgrims traveling to the holy city.

One of my Viking era coins is this penny from York:

It is a penny of St Peter made in the city of York, England. It was not found near York though, rather in the separate kingdom of East Anglia. And it is a rare variety; the only other example known from these dies was found in Ireland. So we know these coins got around, and not just by merchants. Frequently it was the seafaring conquering (but also mercantilist) Vikings or the traveling pilgrims and churchmen who took them around.

SaorAlba

Back in ca. 1999 I bought a hoard of silver cut farthings, halves and pennies that were buried ca. 1300 in Northern England. Most of the coins were English, Scottish, couple of Irish - but one halfpenny is from Denmark. The coins ranged in dates from Henry I and David I of Scotland to early Henry III.

Icollecteverything

Good stuff. That was quite a Viking hoard and story. I am half Norwegian but my plundering and pillaging days are over. cool penny too.
One theory about containers of Roman coins found buried in various places is that they were payments for soldiers that were buried before battle. Then they were killed in the battle and never retrieved the cache. I wonder if they were all recently minted or a variety of years?
It seems like in certain times at least that it didn't matter when or where the coin came from as long as it was a piece of bronze, silver or gold.

Sapyx

I assume the question is more along the lines of, "is there any evidence that a recorded hoard was originally assembled as a coin collection?"

There have been a couple of coin hoards discovered that appear to have been assembled as "collections", rather than simply as piles of money: hoards with minimal duplication of types, with mixtures of local bronze coinages and with obsolete withdrawn coins mixed up with newer coins. In other words, a hoard of coins that would not be likely to have simply come together purely by chance, by a merchant or trader pulling coins out of circulation; the coins seem to have been selected, in much the same way a modern coin collector today would select out coins.

What cannot be preserved in the hoards is the reasoning and methodology behind this apparent selection. Was it assembled by a "coin collector" as we would understand the term, or was there some other reason why someone would "collect coins"?

The earliest historical reference we have to "Coin collecting" were people assembling coin collections of a very specific kind for a purely pragmatic reason: Pliny the Elder reports that fake and counterfeit denarii of various types were in high demand for merchants to study, with some people even being prepared to pay many genuine denarii for a fake ("Natural History", Volume 33, Chapter 46). It is also reasonable to assume, given the large number of "Restorative" types in the early Imperial series, that there was some kind of reference collection of old coins in the Roman mint, which later die-cutters were able to refer to and copy from.

The biggest problem an ancient coin-collector would have faced is lack of knowledge. The earliest known coin catalogues weren't printed in the West until the Renaissance. With no knowledge of what kinds of coins that there were out there to be collected, a collector would have been stumbling in the dark, "collecting" haphazardly rather than in a systemic way.

Icollecteverything

Hey Sapyx, I was recently thinking about how long collecting coins had been going on but then I remembered the story I talked about in my first post. Even though the coins came from a variety of regions it did not appear to be a collection. I think it was in a purse of some sort and also less than 20 coins.
Then I became interested in the commerce side of it and what would happen to coins that ended up a long way from home. Would they be accepted for the metal value or just melted down? Plus I have other questions.
Anyway, I will have some fun reading up on hoards now.

Sorry I took so long to respond.