| Description: |
British Museum Press 2005. 184 pages, 30 b/w plates, quarto, blue cloth, dust jacket.
Shrink wrapped. New.
In 1992, Eric Lawes discovered, quite by accident, the largest
hoard of late Roman gold and silver coins and jewellery ever found in Britain, while
looking for a lost hammer in a freshly ploughed field near Hoxne, Suffolk. In addition to
detailing the over fifteen thousand gold and silver coins found in the hoard, this book
includes a discussion of the production and supply of Roman coinage in the latter half of
the 4th century AD. This book is innovative in its analysis of the practice of coin
clipping and copying in Britain. As well as focusing on the hoard itself, this book steps
back and places the Hoxne hoard in a wider perspective. Discussed with in it are the
distribution of hoards within England, how hoards can help our understanding of the past
and the greater significance of the Hoxne find in our perception of Britain in late
antiquity. This is a well documented account of an extremely important find in the history
of Roman Britain, and will be of interest to both collectors of Roman coinage and those
with a passion for Roman history.
From the publisher: Discovered in 1992, the Hoxne
Treasure is perhaps the richest cache of gold and silver coins, jewellery and tableware
from the entire Roman world. The core of this volume is the catalogue of the 15,000 late
4th- and early 5th-century gold and silver coins, together with an in-depth discussion of
the production and supply of late Roman coinage. Hoxne's silver coins are particularly
interesting, and the book also contains ground-breaking discussions of the silver content
of Roman currency as well as of the peculiarly British phenomena of coin clipping and
copying. The value of the Hoxne Treasure in shedding light on an otherwise dark period of
British history also calls for a broader, non-numismatic perspective, and the volume
includes an important chapter dealing with the social significance of precious metals in
the later Roman empire, particularly their role in the gift-exchange networks that defined
and maintained late Roman imperial society. |
