Currency and Money Economy

THE widely-held theory of the primitive state of German culture in pre-Carolingian times has found considerable support in the general conceptions which have prevailed concerning the currency of that period. Misled by Tacitus’ well-known remark about the lack of silver and gold, ¹ scholars have even gone so far as to hold that the Germans, both before and after the migrations, possessed neither a coinage of their own nor indeed any form of metal reckoning. ² The facts that in the folk-laws values are computed in terms of cattle, and that in Ulfilas’ well-known Gothic translation of the Bible pecunia is translated faihu seemed to confirm this view. It was thought that the Roman coins in use among the Germans were accumulated as treasure and were not used for making payments. After the migrations and the fall of the West Roman Empire, the economically isolated German tribes were thought to have received no further appreciable external supplies of currency from which they might have been able to develop some system of currency of their own. Thus it appeared probable that the Inner German peoples, long after the foundation of their settlements, developed no system of money-valuation of the goods in which they traded and which they used. ³