Minted: The Anglo-Saxon and Norman Mint Towns of England and What Became of Them

From Edgar's reform of about 973 until the twelfth century, every English penny named the town where it was struck. That makes the coinage an unusually precise record of which places were thought fit to hold a mint, and a natural starting point for asking whether urban importance persists. I assemble 70,995 unique coin records from the Fitzwilliam Museum's public database of the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds (EMC) and the Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles (SCBI), keep the 33,609 records of the kings from Edgar to Stephen whose mint is a single, certain place in England or Wales, and count mints and distinct moneyers reign by reign. Surviving coins come from 68 mints under Æthelred II and a peak of 71 under Cnut. London, York and Lincoln account for 28% of moneyers in Æthelred's reign. Among 2,894 single finds placed at a findspot, the median coin was lost 88.5 km from its mint, against 163 km if mints were drawn at random from national output, and 6.2 times as many finds as expected come from the nearest working mint. Eight of the ten largest mints of about 1000 were among the largest English towns in the 1377 poll tax, and moneyer numbers then correlate with Census 2021 population (Spearman 0.44). The correlation with the 1801 census is weaker (0.23): only 12 of the 30 largest towns of 1801 had been mint towns. Small mints such as Lydford, Cadbury, Torksey and Dunwich are villages or less today. The mint network marks a durable medieval urban hierarchy that industrialisation overlaid rather than replaced. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/saxon-mints/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/saxon-mints. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/saxon-mints/.