mint

Latin, moneta.

Between the late tenth and the early twelfth century, England enjoyed a national, uniform coinage, the most sophisticated monetary system in Europe. Coins were periodically re-minted and re-issued, an exercise profitable to the Crown and one which revealed the strength of the Anglo-Saxon administrative system. The king controlled the minting of coins throughout the kingdom, and all coins bore his name and portrait. They were 'powerful messengers of royal authority' (Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon state, page 33).

The only coin normally minted was the silver penny, and it has been estimated that an average issue might contain some 5-10 million pennies, rising to as much as 40 million on occasion. Coins normally bore the name of the mint and the moneyer as well as that of the king, which has enabled numismatists to establish that some 60 to 70 mints were in operation during the late Anglo-Saxon period, the bulk of them in what had been the kingdom of Wessex. Of these, Domesday Book names 28, 22 of them in Great Domesday.

For the Domesday mints, see H.C. Darby, Domesday England (1977); and for more detail on the monetary system, R.H.M. [Michael] Dolley, The Norman Conquest and the English coinage (1966); D.M. Metcalf, 'Continuity and change in English monetary history, c.973-1086', British Numismatic Journal, vol. 50 (1981), pages 20-49; vol. 51 (1982), pages 52-90; and Sally P.J. Harvey, Domesday: Book of Judgement (2013), chapter 6 and appendix 1..