CHAPTER FOURTEEN
COINAGE
--.•. --
Daphne Nash Briggs
W
hen Julius Caesar published a brief account of what he observed and accom-
plished during his invasions of Britain in 55 and 54 Be, one of the first things
he mentioned in a general description of the island and its inhabitants was that 'they
use either bronze or gold coinage, or else iron bars of definite weight instead of coins'
(De Bello Gallico V.12.4).
A Roman military commander attempting to justify a dangerous and speculative
war of foreign conquest to an educated Roman audience had, perhaps, a natural
preoccupation with money and supplies, and this observation was in fact part of a
short list of the most important resources of Britain as he perceived them: a vast
population, multitudes of livestock, gold and bronze coinage, and ores of tin and
iron. But as the geographer Strabo remarked a couple of generations later
(Geography IV.5.3), Caesar did not in fact achieve very much, although he brought
back 'hostages, slaves, and quantities of other booty'. In Strabo's time, early in the
first century AD, the Romans were finding it more profitable to trade with the island
and tax the traffic than to try to conquer and administer warlike and politically
labile tribesmen; it was not until the 40S AD that conquest became both feasible and
attractive, with the growth of several large and relatively stable kingdoms in southern
Britain after a century of lively contact with the Roman provinces of Gaul.
The history of Celtic coinage is intimately connected with the evolving relation-
ship between Celtic Europe and the Mediterranean between the fourth century Be
and the mid-first century AD, and the geographical location of the most influential
centres of Celtic coinage production tended to move outwards from the margins of
the Mediterranean world with the passage of time.
Britain was in fact the last major region of ancient Celtic Europe to adopt coinage,
and the earliest British coins were indeed of gold and a tin-rich bronze alloy, in line
with Caesar's description. The cast bronze (potin) coins in fact came first, in the later
second century Be, followed by the earliest gold between c.So and 60 Be (Haselgrove
1993). At the time of Caesar's invasions, however, British coinage was still at an
early stage in its development, and its expansion into one of the most intricate and
potentially informative of all Celtic coinage systems took place during the following
century when the Roman conquest of Gaul had temporarily brought the north-
western frontier of the Roman Empire to the Channel coastline. On the Continent,
244