The Crown Renewed: The Administration of Coinage in LeÓn-Castile c.1085–1200

Historians like to hold up Norman England as the most centralized European state of its day, often pointing to the crown’s purported regulation of coinage and other financial machinery as proof of its sophistication. ¹ W.L. Warren, however, cautioned that “the evidence for the actual operation of Norman administration is very meager.” ² In terms of the coinage, the written and numismatic evidence is perplexing but overall indicates that William the Conqueror (1066–87) and his sons struggled to maintain the monetary system of their Anglo-Saxon forebears. When Henry I (1100–35) took the throne he promised to abandon a levy called monetagium commune that his father had introduced though the “precise nature” of this tax is uncertain. ³ Eight years later, Henry was so plagued by counterfeiters that he was forced to “snick” his coinage to show that the interior contained good silver. Then, during the Christmas season of 1124, he punished more than half of the perhaps 150 moneyers in England, probably cutting off their right hands and genitals. His monetary policy, as Warren notes, “was running into serious difficulties.” ⁴