Author: Murray Jack Andrews

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

This thesis presents an archaeological and numismatic analysis of coin hoarding in medieval England and Wales, using sophisticated multivariate and spatial techniques to identify, characterise, and interpret patterns in hoards as a means of understanding the specific behaviours, motivations, and mentalités that effected their formation and deposition throughout the period c.973-1544. The primary source material, much of it hitherto unpublished, consists of a bespoke research database of 815 medieval coin hoards, which contains information relating to both the contents and archaeological contexts of hoards and their spatial and temporal circumstances of deposition and rediscovery. This material is scrutinised across four key chapters that explore different aspects of hoarding phenomena. The impacts of post-depositional processes on data coverage and representativeness are discussed in Chapter 3, and inform considerations of the spatial and temporal incidence of coin hoarding presented in Chapter 4; analyses presented in this latter chapter situate hoarding in a wider archaeological and historical context, and highlight the influence of background economic and monetary phenomena on global trends in hoard patterning. Chapter 5 offers a large-scale study of patterns in numismatic and non-numismatic contents, and evidences the technical processes and subjective considerations "†both economic and non-economic "†that resulted in the production of hoard deposits. These findings are complemented in Chapter 6 by a pioneering discussion of the containers and archaeological contexts of medieval hoard deposits, which emphasise the diverse motives behind hoarding behaviour. The results of this study therefore offer significant new insights into coin hoarding as a medieval socio-economic phenomenon, and are of direct relevance to wider debates concerning the relationships between people, places, and objects in historic societies.