Burhs in the West Midlands

Principal investigator: Liam
Level: PhD level research

As part of my PhD into burhs in the West Midlands, I am investigating the networks between the Æthelflædan burhs built in West Mercia in the late ninth and early tenth century and the way in which these sites developed into civic and economic hubs alongside their military functions. Part of this economic function is burghal minting, the forms this took and the purposes this served. This will include an analysis of the changing shape of burghal minting; which sites flourished and why, and which sites saw minting activity for more political and symbolic ends. To this end, I will be creating a series of distribution maps to examine the scale and spread of minting from individual burghal sites in order to identify which sites were most prominent, how this changed throughout the tenth century, and to what extent the liquidity of the economy was on a local or a national scale.

By far the best way of gauging the extent to which a mint's issues entered the larger economy is through the cataloguing and analysis of single finds, as these best illustrate due to random loss the extent to which a single issue has travelled. It is because of this that I hope to make full use of the PAS database and access those most recent finds which have not yet been added to the SCBI Early Medieval Corpus of Coin Finds. This project is intended to run for three years, with completion in 2016.

Audit data

• Created: 10 years ago
• Created by: D P