ABSTRACT
Viking raids were a constant fear in Brittany in the mid-ninth century. According to the near contemporary Life of St Malo a peasant farmer in the region of Alet named Hetremaon heard that the invaders had torched the neighbouring settlements and were now approaching his village, Cherrueix in Ille-et-Vilaine. So he placed four denarii on the threshold of his cottage with a prayer to St Malo: ‘Take this money and protect my home’. Other monastic tenants did the same, ‘each according to his means’ (unusquisque secundum quod poterat). eir secular neighbours, however, who owed their loyalties only to the Breton ruler Judicael, said to themselves, ‘Why bother to give anything? Our houses are next to theirs, so St Malo will look aer us, too’. e Northmen arrived at the village, burned down the houses of Judicael’s half of the village and drove away their cattle, but spared those belonging to St Malo.1 One modern reader with a hermeneutic of suspicion towards miracle texts2 sees this as a tribute of four deniers per house which has been disguised by the hagiographical author,3 but this surely misses the whole point of the story, namely that the money ended up with the Church, not the invaders. For the numismatist and economic historian the tale has a very dierent signicance, however, in that it implies that an ordinary Breton peasant could have owned at least four denarii during the period in question in order for the miracle to have had any plausibility. is is particularly interesting, because as will become clear below, minting in Brittany at this time was limited, and if any region of the Frankish west might be expected to have had little access to coin, it would be Brittany. is incident – whether legendary or based on a genuine event – thus oers an invaluable insight into the contemporary perceptions of the use of coin in the Carolingian empire in the ninth century.
