PAST CRIMESbeen worth a day’s pay for an ordinary worker in the Roman period. The coin
seems to show a commemoration of the Battle of Actium in 31BC, when
Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) defeated the forces of Mark Antony
and Cleopatra. The fake coin was made a little later–by a very poor faker. It
has the wrong emperor on one side, and on the reverse, the crocodile is facing
the wrong way. The forger has even spelled‘Egypt’incorrectly. It was struck
from pure silver, so the forger would not even have made a profit. His motives
for making the piece have baffled even the experts at the British Museum!^14
Another British find demonstrates a further monetary crime–coin clipping,
the cutting off of slivers of metal from round the edges. In 1992 at Hoxne in
Suffolk, a massive hoard of late fourth and early fifth centuryADRoman gold,
silver and other objects was discovered. Originally buried in an oak chest,
there were nearly 15,000 coins and some 200 pieces of jewellery and
tableware, including some magnificent silver salt cellars or spice pots, which
can now be seen in the British Museum. The coins date the hoard to afterAD
407, right at the very end of the Roman occupation of Britain.
A study of the silver coins in the hoard found that nearly every one had
been clipped, something that has been noted in Britain, but seems to have been
rare at the time elsewhere. The clipping was fairly carefully done to avoid
damaging the face of the emperor on the front of the coins. The spare silver
taken from each coin could have been melted down for profit illegally, or even
perhaps could have been done deliberately by the authorities to acquire more
bullion. By the start of the fifth century, the British province was rather
isolated from the official money supply from Rome. Barbarians had poured
across the Rhine into Northern France and the Low Countries, barring the way
for the traditional transport routes from the Mediterranean, and from the mint
in Lyon, a major source of Roman coinage for use in Britain. The late Roman
officials may have become desperate to find a way to maintain the money
supply for the province, not only for trade but to pay the wages of soldiers and
administrators trying to keep the local government together.
Clay moulds for coin production have also been found in Scotland–but
they date fromafterthe Roman withdrawal back to the line of Hadrian’s Wall.
The moulds were used to make counterfeitdenarii; at the time of these
moulds, the Roman currency had become severely debased, and even the
official‘silver’coins could contain less than fifty per cent pure metal, and
have a thin silver wash over hightin bronze. This would have been the
counterfeiters’job easier, as the silver wash wore off quite quickly in use. X
ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) of the moulds found no silver at all–there
were traces of base copper alloys, lead and zinc. It is possible that these coins