The Coinage of the British Empire Author:Henry Noel Humphreys Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. COINS OF THE SAXON HEPTARCHY. THE SKEATTE. The departure of the Roman legions about A. D. 414, left the inhabitants of Southern Britain an ... more »easy prey to the first bold invaders. But before the Saxon occupation of the island it may be presumed that some sort of coinage, in imitation of the Roman, to which the people had been long accustomed, must have been adopted, and traces of it, in fact, exist in those rude pieces of the Roman style, which are now becoming very scarce, as they have hitherto been rejected by cabinets as merely bad specimens or forgeries of Roman coin. The earliest Saxon money of which we have any examples is of a totally different character, bearing not the slightest resemblance to the Roman, with the exception of one or two devices, copied perhaps from some of the coins of Constantine. It appears, therefore, that it must have been brought into this country by the Saxons, along with a new set of weights, values, and denominations. The coins alluded to are called Skeattae (Latinised scata), a term which Ruding derives from a Saxon word, meaning a portion, and supposes that these coins were a portion of some merely nominal sum by which large amounts were calculated. They probably remained in partial use long after the general adoption of the Saxon silver penny, as they are mentioned in the laws of Ethelstan, where it is stated that 30,000 skcattse are equal to £120, which would make them in value about one twenty-fifth part less than a penny. The skeatta is probably, in form and value, an imitation of the Byzantine quinarius, finding its way, in gradually debasing forms, from Constantinople through the east and north of Germany. It is thought by some that the Saxons also derived their weight, called Colonia (Cologne) weight, from the ...« less