Did Anglo-Saxons use solid gold coins? What on earth is a "mancus"? And why did King Offa of Mercia put his name on a fake Islamic coin?
One of the most curious coins in the British Museum’s Anglo-Saxon collection is a small (20mm diameter) gold coin found in Rome in the 19th century, weighing 4.3g, and which carries the inscription OFFA REX on one side. In all other respects it is clearly a copy of a dinar minted by the Abbasid caliph.
It is also clear that the Mercian die-cutter did not recognise the patterns on the coin he was copying to be a form of writing, much less understand it, perhaps thinking it was merely decorative, as the coin bears the inscription “ There is no God but Allah alone without equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah ” albeit with a number of mistakes. It also features the date of issue of the coin being copied -ah 157 or 773-4 CE - in the very middle of Offa’s reign, suggesting the parent coin itself was surprisingly new when it was plagiarised.
It is also clear that the Mercian die-cutter did not recognise the patterns on the coin he was copying to be a form of writing, much less understand it, perhaps thinking it was merely decorative, as the coin bears the inscription “ There is no God but Allah alone without equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah ” albeit with a number of mistakes. It also features the date of issue of the coin being copied -ah 157 or 773-4 CE - in the very middle of Offa’s reign, suggesting the parent coin itself was surprisingly new when it was plagiarised.
"Offa's Dinar", or the "Mancus of Offa", discovered in Rome in 1841, a somewhat clumsy copy of an Arabic gold dinar with the inscription "Offa Rex" slotted in amongst the Arabic script. ( (C) British Museum )
This coin is often speculatively connected to the a ‘Peter’s Pence’ levy of 365 gold coins which Offa collected and paid annually to the Pope, from 796 CE (Williams, 2008). This levy was known as the ‘Rome-scot’ - the latter part deriving from the Old English name for a different coin (the small thick early Anglo-Saxon silver ‘sceat’). It’s tempting to imagine the bewilderment of the pontiff receiving 365 such coins from a Christian king each bearing ‘the shahada’ (the Islamic Declaration of Faith), but in fact, the dinar on which they were based would have been very familiar in Rome, where all manner of high-value solid gold coins collided....
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