210 Mr. PETRIE'S Inquiry into the Origin and 



one, a conclusion which I apprehend most persons will be disposed to reject, 

 and which, though the fact is not wholly impossible, it is far from my in- 

 tention to uphold. Maintaining, as I do, the opinion that this Tower could not 

 have been erected after the time of Cambrensis, and consequently, from his al- 

 lusion to such a Tower at Kildare, that its age must have been considerable 

 in the twelfth century, I confess it appears to me, that, while the conclusions 

 of the writers to whom I have alluded, respecting the antiquity of the brac- 

 teate coins, is open to doubt, the discovery of pieces of that description under 

 the floor of this Tower should rather be taken as an evidence in favour of their 

 earlier antiquity, than that the erection of the Tower should be referred to so 

 late" a period as they assign to them. Nor do I think that this inference is at 

 all weakened by what has been written either by Sperlingius or Mr. Lindsay : 

 for the bracteate coins of the northern nations, which the former shows to be 

 of the twelfth and succeeding centuries, and which present legends from which 

 their dates have been ascertained, are very different from those discovered in 

 the Tower of Kildare. And though Pinkerton seems to have adopted the opi- 

 nion of Sperlingius, as to the age and origin of these coins, he has, on reflec- 

 tion, deemed it prudent to acknowledge, in a note, that " some are supposed 

 to be of the tenth century." 



Pinkerton might well make such an acknowledgment, for there are not want- 

 ing learned writers, who place the origin of this description of coin in the 

 seventh century, and one, M. Tillemann Frize, Miintz- Spiegel, 1. iii., who 

 assigns them an antiquity anterior even to the Christian era. Others, however, 

 as Olearius, Ludwig, and Doederlin, have come to the conclusion that this 

 kind of money originated in Germany, after the discovery of the silver mines 

 in that country in the tenth century ; and this opinion derives some support from 

 the fact, that bracteates of the Emperor Conrad II., who died in 1024, and of 

 Werner, bishop of Strasburgh, who died in 1029, have been found in a small 

 earthen urn in the abbey of Gengenbach in 1736. These, I believe, are the 

 earliest German bracteates known ; but it is the opinion of M. Schoepflin, that, 

 though no earlier bracteates of the bishops of Strasburgh have been discovered, 

 the right of coining money, which had been granted to them in 870 by Lothaire 

 le Jeune, the son of Louis le Debonnaire, had been exercised by them uninter- 

 ruptedly from that period. M. Schoepflin is, however, of opinion, that the 



