c.600-75. English gold coinage
There is no evidence of coin production in England before the end of the 6th century, in contrast with the Continent where the barbarian invaders were soon issuing imitation Roman coins of their own. Some of these Continental coins from before c.600 are found in England, but since most of these are pierced or have loops attached, they may have been worn as ornaments rather than circulated as money. Most of the imported coins are from Merovingian Francia, with a scattering of other types.
From the end of the 6th century, imported gold coins tend to be unmounted, and were more probably used as money, perhaps the scillingas (shillings) of the early law codes. The earliest surviving English gold coins also date from about this time; one of them, probably struck by a visiting moneyer of the Frankish king Theudebert II (595-612), names the moneyer and the mint-place (Eusebius of Canterbury). Coins tended to follow Merovingian or earlier Roman models, with frequently a bust on one side and a cross on the other. Sometimes the legends are legible, but they seem most often to be a blundered or other incomprehensible assemblage of letters and runes. Some coins name the mint-place as London, others name the moneyer (e.g. Witmen, Pada), and one exceptional issue is made in the name of King Eadbald of Kent.
English minting of gold coin seems to have been mostly limited to Kent and the upper Thames valley, though one issue is associated with York and another seems to be East Anglian. Minting of coin in the first quarter of the 7th century seems to have been a sporadic affair. There was a more sustatined coinage in the 630s and 640s, but the fact that most of the surviving coins seem to be little worn and to have been struck from a small group of dies suggests again a small coinage with a limited circulation. The largest output of gold coin came in the third quarter of the century. The gold content of the coins dropped progressively throughout the century, and in about 675 the gold standard was abandoned altogether in favour of silver. Occasional gold coins were produced until the end of the Anglo-Saxon period (King Eadred's will in the 10th century calls for the minting of 2,000 of them), but they were very much the exception to the standard silver penny.
P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, 1: The Early Middle Ages (5th-10th centuries) (Cambridge: 1986)