 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 of them would be lost. There could be hundreds of reasons why they were lost, from sheer bad luck to barbarian attacks, but the reason must usually remain guesswork.
The first silver periodThe first 44 hoards, chronologically speaking, are listed in Table 1 and the first half of Table 2, and are hoards of coins of the first and second centuries, when the economy was stable and good quality gold and silver coins were available (even though the silver was gradually being de-based).
The first thing that strikes us is the wide range of emperors and dates represented by the coins in each hoard, a range of up to 200 years in some cases. Many date back to the Roman Republic. This doesn't mean that each hoard was being amassed over a long period of time. What it does mean is that all of the coins represented in each hoard were still circulating in Britain at the closing date of that hoard. Closing dates of hoards are spread out evenly over the entire period, indicating perhaps that they were not buried as a response to a particular danger, but as a matter of every-day security.
If the idea of denarii circulating 200 years after they were made is difficult to swallow, consider this: Could one family have accumulated them year in year out for 200 years and if so, why, since the oldest and the newest coins would have had equal value. Perhaps the hoard was started 10, 20, 30 years before it was eventually lost. In that case where would the older coins come from to start that hoard? Only from circulation.
Claudius conquered Britain in 43 A.D. and Roman coinage was introduced. No Roman mints were set up in Britain, and money to pay the army and administration was sent from mints in Rome or elsewhere. Those lucky enough to be in receipt of a salary or payment in these coins were expected to pay their taxes in the form of silver denarii. To the rest of the population, a denarius was a high value coin, so apart from the nouveau riche, they mainly remained outside this economic cycle and stuck to barter. Consequently, Britain rema