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Silver Linings: Money, Plague and Economic Change in 7th and 8th century England

Silver Linings: Money, Plague and Economic Change in 7th and 8th century England

Paper by Rory Naismith

Given at University of Oxford on January 23, 2024

Excerpt: So Bede’s life thus encompasses a remarkable set of economic changes and there is broad consensus among archaeologists and historians that England in the long 8th century, which really means the late 7th to the early 9th centuries, was a relatively wealthy dynamic place with minsters and their products like manuscripts and stone buildings as the most vivid, articulate survivals of the age. But there is less confidence about how and why this transformation came about especially in its early stages around the time of Bede and what this talk was consider is how and why these changes began when they did.

Rory Naismith is professor of early medieval English history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. You can follow him on X/Twitter @Rory_Naismith

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Top Image: Silver penny of Offa of Mercia – Photo courtesy The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum

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