irly constant. Newly minted coins were 'charged'; that is to say, if a Roman Pound of silver was hypothetically sold to the mint, the mint would manufacture 96 denarii but pay the seller, say, 90 denarii. This created a profit for the mint but also prevented denarii in circulation being melted down for profit. Clearly, then, there was no particular incentive to melt down or hoard old or new coins as a means of making a profit. It also follows that old denarii would have been just as acceptable as new ones for circulation. As we shall see below, denarii from a wide range of dates were hoarded and must therefore have also been circulating. Some issues may have been officially de-monetised, but records of official recalls have not survived the passing of time, although it is known that Republican denarii were officially de-monetised during the reign of Trajan. However, de-monetisation of coins is not a hundred percent achievable when the coins are worth their own weight in silver, unless they can be brought to a mint, which Britain did not have, and clearly some survived.
From the end of the second century, de-basement set it, so clearly hoards after that date could have been used to keep back better silver, but even here mixtures of old and new coins are still found together together. Even when the coinage was de-based to virtually zero intrinsic value, coins were still being hoarded.
The obvious conclusion from the above is that coin hoards should be be considered as the equivalent of today's bank accounts, with an outflow of coins as well as an inflow. Although banks, of sorts, did exist in Roman towns, outside of them people had to carry their money around with them or hide it somewhere safe, such as a locked, immobile chest. The other place to hide money was in the ground, perhaps in a purse or other container. These are, of course, the hoards that are found today.
People were, perhaps unconsciously, selective about what they hoarded. That is to say, when they paid for something they tended to use the smallest, worst looking, coins and retained the best ones, in much the same way as today, we might try to get rid of our crumpled and torn banknotes first. Necessity may have meant that the 'better' coins may have had to have been spent anyway, but if a person needed put some money aside, then the 'better' money would have tended to have found it's way into a hoard. That doesn't mean that it that it stayed there forever (unless the hoard was 'lost'); but it did mean that the 'better' money circulated slowly and the 'worst' money fast. The signs of a long and fast circulation can be seen in the wear and knocks on Mark Antony's 'legionary' denarii, minted in Athens in 31 B.C. These were made of poor quality silver and were in circulation for well over 100 years throughout the Roman Empire, including Britain. In fact, they were present in one British hoard, the Shapwick hoard (discussed below), 255 years after they were minted.
The Treasure Reports give a 'Deposited' date for each hoard, which is usually the date of the most recent coin. This gives a false impression that the date a hoard was deposited is accurately known to the nearest year. Obviously a hoard cannot have been buried before the date of the last coin, but it could have been buried or lost considerably later. This is a particularly important consideration when the flow of new coinage ceases, as happened in Britain at the beginning of the 5th century, as there is then no way of knowing how much later a hoard was actually buried. The words 'Closing date' is more correctly used instead of 'Deposited'.
If we accept that the deposition date of a hoard may have been much later than the closing date assigned to it, then it is much more difficult to connect its loss or abandonment to some event, such as a war or political change. Clearly if we do not know when a hoard was buried, it is even more difficult to know why it was lost or abandoned. If hoards were habitually kept buried when they weren't being 'accessed', then it is a statistical certainty that a proportion 