SSNS Seminar – Dr Kristin Bornholdt Collins – ‘Hanging in the Balance: Viking-Age Coins and Other Currencies at the Manx Museum’

The SSNS Seminar Series continues on 23 May with a talk by Dr Kristin Bornholdt Collins, entitled ‘Hanging in the Balance: Viking-Age Coins and Other Currencies at the Manx Museum, Douglas, Isle of Man’

This is a free, ticketed event; please register below.

Abstract:

Sharing highlights from a recently published book on the Viking-Age coin finds and currency-related material from the Manx Museum, this paper provides a brief introduction to the history and genesis of the collection, including recent finds. It sets out the evidence for the establishment in the tenth and eleventh centuries of a system that used silver and other metals on a substantial scale, but in the form of bullion as well as coin. This culminated in the production of the Hiberno-Manx coinage, a series of coins that was produced on the island in the middle decades of the eleventh century, but did not displace other currencies. Located at a geographical crossroads — and influenced by the economies of Anglo-Saxon England, Dublin and the Continent as well as the viking North — the Isle of Man was suspended between two worlds: one that counted silver and one that weighed it. While there is a general turn towards ‘national’ coinages across Northern Europe by the year 1000, Man appears to have found a profitable compromise by embracing both weighed metal and coin. The mixed or ‘dual’ economy that resulted represents a middle way which was highly versatile and therefore hospitable to trade in an international marketplace. The fact that this seemingly ‘unregulated’ approach to handling wealth continued well into the eleventh century suggests that it was not just a short-term, habit-driven solution in a time of flux, but a deliberate and sustainable choice.

Bio:

Kristin Bornholdt Collins is an independent scholar and numismatist with degrees from St Andrews and Cambridge (MPhil & PhD, Archaeology). Her doctoral research focused on the Viking-Age coin finds from the Isle of Man and the economy of the Irish Sea region (2003). Her primary interests include the Hiberno-Manx coinage (from c. 1025) and the intersection and overlap of bullion, coin and other economies in the later Viking Age. She has written a number of articles, including the chapter on ‘Coinage’ in the New History of the Isle of Man (vol. 3, eds Duffy and Mytum 2015). In her recently published book (April 2024) she documents and discusses the important collection of early medieval coins in the Manx Museum, Douglas, Isle of Man, Anglo-Saxon, Hiberno-Scandinavian, Hiberno-Manx and other coins and currencies (to c 1275), SCBI 73.

Registration below. Details for the Zoom meeting will be emailed in advance of the seminar.