The Wealth of Anglo-Saxon England

ISBN: 9780199253937 出版年：2013 页码：168 Sawyer, Peter Oxford University Press

Peter Sawyer is one of our most distinguished Anglo-Saxon or, perhaps better, Anglo-Scandinavian historians. His annotated list of Anglo-Saxon charters, now revised by Susan Kelly, available online and happily known as ?the electronic Sawyer?, remains a standard work of reference whilst his publications on the Vikings in both Scandinavia and Western Europe have substantially added to our understanding of the impact of these raiders and traders in the ninth, tenth and 11th centuries. Yet historians tend to be remembered for one piece of work, for good or ill, and in Sawyer?s case it is for his important article on ?The wealth of England in the eleventh century?, first published in The Transactions of the Royal Historical Society in 1965. In it he gives what can only be called a glowing account of the Anglo-Saxon economy on the eve of the Conquest, an economy with sufficient wealth in silver from the German mines in the Harz mountains, earned from the profits from an expanding wool trade with Frisia and Flanders, to support the circulation of an ample coinage of high quality that stimulated the growth of exchange and therefore of towns and trade. To misuse Eileen Power?s later quotation, it was the sheep that paid for all.