ined only partially monetised during the first century and the first half of the second. The new province was also expected to be self sufficient, so fresh cash was required only to top up shortfalls in the tax receipts. Shipping coins back to Rome simply for melting and re-issue would not have been very cost effective. Very few coins seem to have gone in and out of Britain in trading activity. The coins that arrived in the province therefore tended to stay there and the result was a 'closed' circulation.
According to calculations by R. A. Abdy, over the period represented by any given hoard, the distribution of coins tends to peak somewhere in the middle of the period, tailing off at the beginning and the end of the period. This is because older coins have had longer to be removed from circulation, while newer coins have not yet reached full circulation. This can more or less be seen in Table 1 and the first half of Table 2, bearing in mind that the listings are by emperor, each of which might have had a long or short reign with the resulting differences in the number of coins issued. One consequence of this is that for smaller hoards the ends of the 'graph' can go below zero, so that the oldest and newest coins that would have been in circulation may not be present in the hoard, so the deposition date may be much later than the date of the most recent coin in the hoard. Conversely, for large hoards, the deposition date is most likely to be straight after the date of the last coin(s).
The coins in the first eight hoards in Table 1 mostly come from before Claudius's invasion. It shouldn't be assumed that the pre-Claudian coins necessarily arrived with the invaders, as Roman coins were present in Britain before then, as a result of trading, gifts to tribal leaders and the wages earned by British mercenaries. In fact, two of the hoards, Llanhamlach, Wales (Table 1, D182), and Selby, North Yorkshire (Table 1, A117), were in areas still outside direct Roman control. The Woodbridge, Suffolk, find (Table 1, C238) also contained a gold stater of the pre-Roman Celtic leader, Cunobelin. Although this may be unconnected to the rest of the hoard, other mixed Celtic/Roman hoards are known and Celtic coins may have circulated up to the Boudican revolt, c. 61 A.D.
Out of the 44 hoards under discussion, 2 consist of all gold coins, 8 are gold and silver, 28 are all silver, 4 are all bronze and 2 are bronze and silver. Presumably the hoards containing gold were more of a 'savings account' than a 'current account'.
One of the few hoards found from a contemporary urban site, is hoard (Table 1, C249), found at Plantation Place in the City of London (closing c. 180). This consisted of 43 gold aurei that were originally in a purse hidden in a substantial house. The fact that after the owner of the hoard 'lost contact' with his riches, the subsequent occupiers of the house lived there for at least a century without finding it, indicates that it was very well hidden and must have been intended as long term savings, though perhaps 1800 years wasn't the intended term!
Hadrian visited Britain in 121-122 and ordered his famous wall to be built to keep out the northern barbarians. Antoninius Pius (138-161) built his own Antonine wall to the north. In spite of these events and outbreaks of plague, there doesn't seem to be much change in the hoard records, at least for the ones under review.
At the end of the 'first silver period', the hoard records show that most coins of the period were still circulating. The crunch came during the reign of Septimius Severus (193-211) and his son Caracalla (198-217). Severus had to fight off several claimants to the imperial throne as well as making an accommodation with Clodius Albinus (195-197), who at the time was Governor of Britain (in spite of that he doesn't seem to be well represented in the British hoards under review). This left him short of cash, so he massively de-based the silver coinage. Caracalla followed in his father's footsteps by introducing the Antoninianus (also referred to as a Radiate) in 214