Coinage and royal administration in early twelfth-century England, c1135-1154

In collaboration with the British Museum, UEA appointed Arrun to undertake research in the coinage of early twelfth-century England, treating the material very much as a source for English political history in the period.

Although the study of coinage has been integrated with some success into mainstream Anglo-Saxon and early Norman history, there has been no sustained attempt to integrate the twelfth-century coinage into the historical narrative. This studentship aims to address that lacuna by examining the evidence of the coinage and historical texts in parallel. Using new historical thinking, and a novel, interdisciplinary approach which incorporates numismatic evidence in a way not yet done, the project seeks to challenge the accepted orthodoxy concerning the changes to the coinage in this period.

The reign of King Stephen (1135-54) has been represented as one where royal authority broke down, and evidence from the coinage used to bolster that argument. But the change to the coinage in Stephen's reign could, in fact, represent the importation of continental norms of coin production rather than the 'breakdown' of English society. This interpretation would fit with work showing that this main debt-collecting agency of the crown did not simply cease to work, but that its records were deliberately destroyed after 1154. We can thus begin to understand that our interpretation of the reign of Stephen is conditioned by the survival of written sources. With coins, however, new caches of 'documents' have been found to challenge a picture created by what the successors of Stephen chose to record, which provides this opportunity for an imaginative rethinking of the historical evidence.