Coinage and Currency

Roman–Barbarian Discontinuity The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West was so prolonged a process that to expect to find any cataclysmic change in the coinage would be unreasonable. No such violent change or lengthy cessation of coinage occurred except in Britain. After the departure of the army and the breakdown of administrative contacts with the rest of the Empire, no further coin entered Britain, and, within a generation, by about A.D. 435, coin ceased to be used there as a medium of exchange. Not until the latter part of the seventh century were coins again used in Britain as money, although many survived as jewellery or were used for gifts or for compensation. Everywhere else in the area of the western Empire the use of money was maintained. The coinage of the late Roman Empire reflected its economic decrepitude. On the one hand there was highly valued gold coins, the pure gold solidus , introduced by Constantine in 309, together with its half, the semissis , and its third, the tremissis or triens . The solidus weighed 24 carob seeds or carats, about 4.48 grams in modern terms. On the other hand there was the heavy copper follis , revived by Anastasius I in 498 as a coin of forty nummi , and its poor relations down to the nummus . In between came the sparsely issued silver coins, conventionally termed siliquae by numismatists. As units of account 24 siliquae were worth a solidus . The gold coinage was used for imperial gifts and the payment of subsidies to imperial ‘allies’, like the 50,000 solidi paid by Maurice Tiberius to Chilperic in 584.