East Goes West: Baltic and Russian Coin Finds from Tudor England and Wales

Abstract

The “long 16th century” was a period of profound growth in the Anglo-Baltic trade, a phenomenon that is well known from written sources yet only poorly glimpsed in the archaeological record. In order to “fill the gap”, this article examines a previously unstudied corpus of 35 English and Welsh finds of Baltic and Russian coins dated to the Tudor period (1485–1603). The corpus consists mostly of low value silver and billon coins, whose chronology and provenances closely reflect the documented growth of English trade in the Baltic. While none of these coins were ever lawfully permitted to circulate in England and Wales, their spatial spread and composition suggests that they circulated as unofficial substitutes for similarly sized English coins, particularly low value pennies and halfpennies. The coin finds therefore not only reflect the increasingly interconnected trade routes of 16th century Europe, but also demonstrate the differences between official territorial currencies and the more informal systems that emerged in early modern towns and the countryside.