| 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. The Hoxne Treasure included 15,234 gold and
silver coins struck mainly at the western mints of the Roman Empire during the late fourth
and early fifth centuries. The long-vanished wooden chest contained 579 gold solidi, 60
silver light miliarenses, at least 14,565 silver siliquae (including imitations), five
silver half-siliquae and 24 bronze coins. The gold coins were all found together in one
area of the treasure, which suggests that they had been kept together in a container or
bag of organic material that had perished. Most of the silver coins, on the other hand,
seem to have been poured into the chest after the other objects had been fitted in, as
they were found scattered indiscriminately over the whole area of the find. |
