I read an interesting presentation on Academia.edu by Clive Stannard. Yes, the Stannard adjustment guy. You can get a copy here: https://www.academia.edu/36942531/Victoria_University_for_web.pptx
Thank you for the link - the use of foreign coins in Rome is new to me and utterly fascinating, I think. For about as long as I've collected I've been interested in this topic - early America's use of Spanish and other world coins, Azores countermarks, etc.
I have questions about the suggested Stannard procedure for weight adjustment - mainly because it does not seem to me to lead to a sensible way to make coins. The main point to al marco is to save time at the mint by knocking out a fixed number of coins from a fixed weight of silver, without bothering too much about the variation coin to coin. (See Grierson on this) Here is my alternative suggestion. At the point of delivery to the mint silver bullion is weighed, and the owner is given a chit stating the number of coins he is to receive. Now 500g was the standard mina of Persia and also widely adopted as a commercial pound around the ancient Mediterranean. Quite possibly bullion was received or made into 500g bars at the Rome mint, which were then cut up in a binary fashion. (This binary cutting method seems to be something many mints have done, over millennia). So you make 128 denarii by this simple al Marco serial halving method - at c. 3.9g each - which is what we see. Now let us suppose from time to time in the mint some butter-fingered guy dropped a coin, (or some light-fingered guy swiped one, or someone just fluffed his sums). Bound to happen, I would say. At the end of that process then, you have a guy coming round shortly to the mint with a chit for (say) 128 coins, and you only have 127 to give him. Panic stations. You hastily chisel a bit of silver from a rather random bunch of the 127, until you have about 3.9g. You make up the numbers with a denarius from your own pocket, but set the bag of bits to one side to recompense yourself down the line. As I read it, Stannard only finds this chiselling on about 2.5% of the coins, across the board. That does not seem to me to fit with any general scheme to adjust the weight of the coins. It does however fit with an occasional exercise in adjusting the number of coins.
You are completely ignoring the concept of al marco. No care whatsoever was taken to assure the coins weighed the same as each other but only that they produced a certain number from a certain total weight. Individual coins were not weighed. As I understand the process, slightly more than the desired weight of silver was melted and cast into the exact number of flans, lets say 128. Those 128 were weighed as a group and must exceed the desired total. Then. at random, coins were removed and scooped until the total was exactly as desired. The person doing this work might eyeball/select larger coins but it is not necessary for the system to work as long as you got 128 coins that weighed one unit total. Skilled workers would, with practice, come closer in the first place so fewer coins would need to be adjusted. You also assume that the mint was a commercial facility converting metal into coins for customers. This is not supported by the Roman system where the metal was supplied by the State or the moneyer. Metal removed from the first batch would be added to the second melt with enough extra to assure the total would be exceeded (never undershot which would void the melt). All the metal in the building belonged to the same owner so it made little difference whether the total was close or way over except for the extra work required and the people doing the work had the most to gain out of doing it with as few adjustments as possible. Also note that there are coins with deeper and more shallow adjustments controlled by the angle of the tool used to make the scoop. I propose that the coin with a very shallow scoop with many stutters was done as the batch weight was very near the desired total while deeper ones could be done when they needed to remove a lot. The smallest adjustments might well be erased completely when the flan was struck. deep with few stutters shallow with many stutters Rarely (I really want one) a coin would be grabbed a second time and get a second adjustment on the other side. It is common for deep scoops to show a flat, weak area on the opposite side which is not the same thing as a double scoop. I claim no expertise here save that gained reading the Stannard papers. This process was used for a relatively short time by a few moneyers and probably was ended as more work than it was worth or when they discovered that edge clipping worked as well without leaving scars.
Thanks for the response Doug. I have critical comments on a great deal of what you put above, but need to clear up this initial matter first. I did not ignore "the concept of al marco". I gave a specific clear account of the (medieval Italian) notion of "al marco" in my text. As readers may easily check. Thus I cannot make sense of the suggestion that I "ignored" it. Let alone that I "completely" ignored it. I feel if we are to make worthwhile progress we first have to cut out the hyperbole and I fear that is what I see here Rob Tye
No problem Doug. I just felt the exchange needed less passion and more hard facts. This does highlight more general matters concerning the way two sides of numismatics - medievalists vs ancients people - often take very different approaches to historical economic matters. In part this could be because the historical economic matters just were differently arranged in the two periods, but its important to bear in mind that we have way more facts to go on regarding medieval matters, whereas we are often just left guessing regarding ancient events. A second thing that troubles me is that some very prominent writers on ancient events in the 20th century seems to me to muddle together two separate matters - their opinions on how the ancient world worked, and the way they think the modern world ought to work. Good examples of this would be R G Collingwood and Moses Finley. Both put their cases very forcefully, and seem to have encouraged others to follow suit. Collingwood is especially interesting as in his philosophy of history he actually claimed to have special powers of historical insight denied to ordinary mortals................ I find that troublingly elitist and prefer to try to approach matters with humility towards the facts, and in a spirit of collegiate curiosity Rob Tye
