A 700-YEAR-OLD English coin has been found

[Puffin]

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/herit ... -1-3371112

A 700-YEAR-OLD English coin has been found near the abbey where the victorious Robert the Bruce took booty from the Battle of Bannockburn.


The silver penny was discovered yards from Cambuskenneth Abbey, near Stirling, by archaeologists looking for artefacts from the time of the 1314 battle.

The small coin, minted in London during the late 13th or early 14th century, may have been a month’s wages for a soldier in Edward II’s defeated army.

[lammytheman]

I would have thought that at the rate of a penny a month they were a bit short changed.
Not much for getting hacked to pieces for.

[fiddiwebb]

Bit of a tenuous link suggesting it may have been among the spoils of battle taken back to the abbey by the Bruce from the battlefield, from an area like an abbey I would expect a whole range of coins from different periods to turn up.

Agree with lammy defo underpaid if it was a penny a month!

[ageezer]

why so many finds from an abbey ? the monks may have been potless and had nothing to lose.
even the major abbeys may have given up little in the past .
the incumbants may have been only a dozen or so living off the land .

[Jimmytheferret]

I also think that the link between the coin and the battle is tenuous in the extreme. Thousands of coins of Edward would probably have been used and lost in Scotland, simply because it was a penny's worth of silver and nobody is going to say no to that, regardless of whose head is on the coin. We find a good number of Scottish coins of that period in England, so why not jump to the conclusion they were all lost by escapees from Bannockburn? I also think that an archaeologist who thinks that a penny was a month's pay needs to check his facts, as it's more likely that a soldier of the day would be earning 2 or 3 pennies a day for his services.

[fiddiwebb]

Certainly agree with you jimmy, the largest percentage of coinage found in Scotland is English.
I live in the North of the Highlands and the majority of hammereds I have found so far are English.

[cleveroonie]

Certainly agree with you jimmy, the largest percentage of coinage found in Scotland is English.
I live in the North of the Highlands and the majority of hammereds I have found so far are English.

yes its the same for a friend of mine too for the earlier ones 13th - 14th c

[Puffin]

My copy of NCMD's Digging Deep has arrived a few minutes ago. Last page has an article, Battle of Bannockburn. With an interview with Dr Tony Pollard who was present when the coin was found by a detectorist in the battlefield survey.

[Lesley]

Programme comes out start of June 2parts over 2hrs..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01lyxwj