Money Supply

Since the 1990s, the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds have been recording single finds of medieval coins, which are an important source of information for long-term trends in money supply in England and Wales. Detailed studies of the coins produced in various periods between the eighth century and the thirteenth century have provided estimates of the numbers of dies used to make the coins, which can serve as an indicator of the size of the coinage. Systematic records of English mint outputs begin in 1220s, and they have been combined with data from coin hoards to produce estimates of the volume of the English coinage produced in particular periods and of the money supply in England and in Britain and Ireland at various dates. Money supply has also been estimated by calculations combining figures for coin supply with estimates of nominal GDP and velocity of circulation.