Family in Pre-Conquest English Minting: The Mint at Colchester

Authors

Jeremy Piercy, College of CharlestonFollow

Abstract

Was the office of moneyer by the late Anglo-Saxon period an inherited office and was it similar to other royal offices or systems of inheritance known to scholars? Much of what we know about late Anglo-Saxon inheritance is centered around the movement of land, which was the most important indicator of wealth, between kinship groups. Mumby addresses the inheritance of bookland (bocland) and how assumptive arguments about “customary” practices do not necessarily translate into practical application when looking at the evidence. This work goes on to outline the progress in inheritance studies over the last few decades, detailing how early work on Anglo-Saxon wills considered them illustrative of typical practice but how later work pointing to a lack of actual family inheritance in the wills seems to implicate the wills as an exceptional practice rather than the norm insofar as kinship inheritance is concerned. Mumby notes that Wormald noticed the lack of sons specifically named within the wills and how this points to a differentiation between what earlier historians assumed as a standard practice and what was likely occurring within late Anglo-Saxon society.

Recommended Citation

Piercy, Jeremy (2020) "Family in Pre-Conquest English Minting: The Mint at Colchester," Medieval People: Vol. 35: Iss. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medpros/vol35/iss1/4