College Record 2019

THE RECORD
engaging expositors who ever lived.
He is survived by his Swedish daughter
Gunnela and her children and
grandchildren.
Henry Hardy (HF)
Michael Metcalf
(1933-2018)
David Michael Metcalf, numismatist, born
8 May 1933; died 25 October 2018.
Michael Metcalf, who has died aged 85,
understood the quantitative significance of
medieval coins long before historians or
other numismatists appreciated it.
His detailed study in the 1960s of the
coins of Offa, the eighth-century king
of Mercia, enabled him to assert that
these coins were struck in much greater
numbers than anyone had realised. This
in turn suggested that early Anglo-Saxon
coins were far too numerous to have
been reserved for the use of an elite.
Instead the numbers argued for a much
greater degree of Dark Age monetisation
than previously assumed. Unsurprisingly,
the established orthodoxy took some
time to come to terms with this, and the
ensuing debates ruffled feathers. One
particular exchange in Oxford in 1966
was sufficiently robust to have been
reported in the national press.
With characteristic grit, Michael resisted
the vigorous criticism of the most
influential scholars, until the advent of
the metal detector in the 80s began to
confirm Michael’s arguments through
the discovery of very large numbers of
medieval coins from all over the country.
Metal detecting was itself then shunned
by archaeologists, who, reasonably enough,
feared the destruction of important
sites, but gradually a more positive attitude
to responsible metal detecting developed.
Nowadays the Portable Antiquities Scheme
records thousands of coin finds reported
by detectorists every year, and the degree
of monetisation in medieval England is no
longer doubted.
The evidence of single coin finds was also
used by Michael to map and quantify the
early Anglo-Saxon gold coins (thrymsas) and
silver pennies (sceattas) of the seventh and
eighth centuries, resulting in his three-volume
work Thrymsas and Sceattas in the Ashmolean
Museum (1993–94). He had energetically
collected the new finds emerging in the 80s
to make the collection of the Ashmolean
Museum in Oxford, where he was Keeper
of the Heberden Coin Room (1982–98), a
leader in this field.
While Michael located the principal areas
in which each type was struck and used, he
also demonstrated that over a quarter of
the English money stock consisted of similar
silver pennies struck in the Low Countries,
testifying to a huge balance of payments
surplus probably attributable to wool exports
as early as the eighth century. Anglo-
Continental trade links were fundamental
to English wealth from at least the eighth
century until our own times.
He also applied his spatial awareness and
statistical skills to the late Anglo-Saxon
coinage from King Edgar’s coinage reform of
973 to the Domesday Book survey of 1086.
This period featured repeated reminting of
the entire national currency, as well as the
export to Scandinavia of huge numbers of
coins as Danegeld. The coin hoards found
above all in Sweden provide numerically
impressive samples, though comparison with
English hoards is essential.
Moreover Michael analysed more than
600 English single finds from this period
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COLLEGE RECORD 2019