Uses of the Round Towers of Ireland, fyc. 225 



inscriptions, and when inscribed hitherto unintelligible, to the Danish rather than 

 to the Irish princes, or, to suppose them, if struck by Irish princes, as is some- 

 times conceded, to be but bungling imitations of the better minted coins of 

 their invaders, struck at so late a period as the eleventh and twelfth centuries ? 

 To me it seems at least as fair to ascribe such pieces to the Irish as to the 

 Danes, and I think that the probability is greater that their antiquity is anterior 

 to that of the well-minted money with legible legends than posterior to it. 

 But, whatever uncertainty there may be as to the true originators and exact date 

 of those heavier coins, which agree in weight with the Saxon and other pen- 

 nies, or deniers, of the middle ages, it appears to me that the real pennies of 

 Ireland, the bracteate pieces of seven grains, have, at present, every claim to 

 an Irish origin, or at least to an origin not immediately derived from either the 

 Danes or Saxons. They do not seem to have been immediately derived from 

 the Saxons, because that people appear to have had no such money, at least, 

 none such has been as yet found ; nor could they have been derived from the 

 Danes, if the generally received opinion be true, that they derived their know- 

 ledge of money from the Saxons ; and it may be remarked, that the earliest 

 bracteate coins struck in Denmark are those of Harold, 945. It is true that the 

 name penning, or pinginn, applied to these pieces by the Irish, seems to be of 

 Teutonic origin, and it might have been derived from the Saxons by the Irish, 

 though applied to a piece differing, not indeed in size, but in weight and thick- 

 ness, from the Saxon penning. And till continental bracteates be found of 

 earlier date than those whose ages are now determined, this would seem the most 

 probable conclusion, as the derivation of the name from the Irish language, given 

 by Cormac in the ninth century, clearly shows "that the word must have been 

 long in use in the country at the time, and could not have been adopted into the 

 language from a recent introduction of this description of money by the Danes. 



That these coins are indeed of Irish mintage is the opinion of Mr. Lindsay ; 

 but, while he allows the merit of striking the bracteate pieces to the Irish 

 princes, from the absence of any resemblance between their types and those 

 found on the Danish coins, he comes to the conclusion, from a resemblance 

 which, he thinks, he discovers between their types and those of the English 

 pennies subsequent to the reign of William I., that their dates should be 

 assigned to the early part of the thirteenth century. His words are : 



VOL. xx. 2 G 



