Coinage and royal administration in early twelfth-century England, c1135-1154

在与大英博物馆的合作下，UEA委托Arrun对12世纪初英国的铸币进行研究，将这些材料视为那个时期英国政治史的来源。尽管有关造币的研究已经在主流盎格鲁-撒克逊和早期诺曼历史中取得了一些成功，但并没有持续的尝试将12世纪的造币纳入历史叙事。这项研究的目的是通过同时检查造币和历史文本的证据来解决这一空白。使用新的历史思维和一种新颖的跨学科方法，以一种尚未完成的方式纳入货币证据，该项目试图挑战关于这一时期硬币变化的公认正统观点。斯蒂芬国王(1135-54年)的统治被描绘为王室权威崩溃的时期，硬币中的证据用来支持这一论点。但事实上，史蒂芬统治时期硬币的变化可能代表着欧洲大陆硬币生产规范的引入，而不是英国社会的“崩溃”。这种解释与工作相吻合，表明这个主要的皇家收债机构并没有简单地停止工作，而是它的记录在1154年之后被故意销毁。因此，我们可以开始理解，我们对斯蒂芬统治的解释是以文字资料的存续为条件的。然而，随着硬币的出现，人们发现了新的文件缓存，挑战了斯蒂芬的继任者选择记录的照片，这为对历史证据进行富有想象力的重新思考提供了机会。

In collaboration with the British Museum, UEA appointed Arrun to undertake research in the coinage of early twelfth-century England, treating the material very much as a source for English political history in the period. Although the study of coinage has been integrated with some success into mainstream Anglo-Saxon and early Norman history, there has been no sustained attempt to integrate the twelfth-century coinage into the historical narrative. This studentship aims to address that lacuna by examining the evidence of the coinage and historical texts in parallel. Using new historical thinking, and a novel, interdisciplinary approach which incorporates numismatic evidence in a way not yet done, the project seeks to challenge the accepted orthodoxy concerning the changes to the coinage in this period. The reign of King Stephen (1135-54) has been represented as one where royal authority broke down, and evidence from the coinage used to bolster that argument. But the change to the coinage in Stephen's reign could, in fact, represent the importation of continental norms of coin production rather than the 'breakdown' of English society. This interpretation would fit with work showing that this main debt-collecting agency of the crown did not simply cease to work, but that its records were deliberately destroyed after 1154. We can thus begin to understand that our interpretation of the reign of Stephen is conditioned by the survival of written sources. With coins, however, new caches of 'documents' have been found to challenge a picture created by what the successors of Stephen chose to record, which provides this opportunity for an imaginative rethinking of the historical evidence.