l6o COINS STRUCK IN DORSET. 



most barbarous penalties for the quality and weight of the pieces 

 bearing their respective names. 



It is generally believed that the dies were engraved in London 

 by the King's goldsmiths as part of their " mystery" or craft, an 

 opinion chiefly based upon the Worcester Domesday, which states 

 that each moneyer paid twenty shillings in London on receiving 

 the dies for the coins. This tax upon new dies was doubtless 

 the chief cause of the many varieties of type that we find to the 

 credit of the later Saxon rulers ; indeed, so great was the dis- 

 content, that William I. compounded for the old impost by 

 substituting a fixed triennial payment. 



In the smaller towns the moneyer was probably the actual 

 craftsman who used the dies, but in the more important places 

 his status in the community was higher, as we read in the laws 

 of ^Ethelred II. of suboperarii in connection with a few mints, 

 while the obligation on a moneyer to produce 192 pence (no 

 small sum in those days) "to buy him law" when accused of 

 malpractices points to his being a man above the artisan class. 



Although it is very possible that some of the earlier Wessex 

 Kings issued money within the borders of the district now 

 known as Dorset, the names of our mints do not appear upon 

 their currency before ^Ethelstan ; it is, therefore, among this 

 King's laws and upon this King's coins that we find the earliest 

 records of any Dorset mints. 



Recent numismatic discoveries have added many new coins, 

 but no additional towns to those known to Mr. Charles Warne 

 when he printed his Ancient Dorset in 1872 ; accordingly 

 Shaftesbury, Wareham, Dorchester, and Bridport, placing them 

 in order by the extent of their output, remain the only burghs 

 where the mintmasters carried out their somewhat risky duties. 

 It is, perhaps, a matter of surprise that to Sherborne, the home 

 of Saxon Bishops and Norman Abbots, no attribution of coins 

 has hitherto been possible. 



It is unlikely that any of these mints were entirely ecclesi- 

 astical in character, as was the case in other counties ; even 

 that of Shaftesbury was probably in lay hands, seeing that the 



