Foreign visitors to medieval Rome had to change their money, but the Anglo-Saxons kept their coins

Twenty Anglo-Saxon coins dug up beside the Vatican point to a busy English quarter in Rome where English money may have changed hands freely.

An Anglo-Saxon traveler heading for Rome in the ninth century had to think about money before leaving. The city ran on the pope's coins, and foreign ones were not supposed to be accepted there.

Twenty silver coins from England have now come out of the ground near the Vatican, most of them from rubbish pits. English pilgrims and settlers lost them, one by one, over decades, in the quarter where they lived.

The archaeologists found these Anglo-Saxon coins mixed in with papal and Roman coins, among workshops. The two historians who studied them say the English may have been allowed to spend their own money in Rome.

The finds are also the first physical trace of the English quarter that medieval texts describe.

One church drew attention

Rory Naismith studies early medieval England in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. Francesca Tinti is a medieval historian at the University of the Basque Country.

In an interview with Earth.com, Naismith said the two had wondered for years what a dig at one particular church would turn up. Santo Spirito in Sassia sits in the middle of the old English quarter.

"Our hope was that it might produce artifacts and coins from England in the early Middle Ages," he said.

"The Palazzo della Rovere site is literally across the road from the church, so the surprise (in a way) was that our imagined discoveries turned out to be what was actually found."

Anglo-Saxon coins in rubbish pits

Archaeologists began digging under the walled garden of the Palazzo della Rovere in 2020, while the building was being turned into a hotel. In 2023, the same dig found the remains of the emperor Nero's theater.

Rome's state archaeology office, the Soprintendenza Speciale di Roma, directed the excavation, and a team coordinated by Marzia Di Mento did the fieldwork.

Thirty coins came out of the ground, and 23 of them were struck in the tenth century. Twenty were Anglo-Saxon: 19 silver pennies and one halfpenny.

They carry the names of Alfred the Great's son, Edward the Elder, and his grandsons Æthelstan and Eadred, who ruled between 899 and 955.

Fourteen Anglo-Saxon coins had fused into two lumps of six and eight after a thousand years underground. The pennies Naismith and Tinti could read closely came from East Anglia, Kent, London and the West Midlands.

Alongside them lay a coin probably struck for Pope John X, two from the mint at Pavia in northern Italy, and a handful of Roman bronzes. Around the coins was the debris of leather, bone and metalwork production, spread over at least 32,000 square feet (3,000 square meters).

Money changed hands here

The coins were not one buried hoard. They lay scattered across five spots, with the two biggest groups in rubbish pits. Each of those groups held Anglo-Saxon, Italian and Roman coins together.

Naismith and Tinti considered whether the silver was being collected to melt down, and found nothing on the site to suggest it. There wasn't a trace of silver working at all.

The halfpenny pointed the same way, because small change like that turns up rarely in hoards and often where lots of low-value trading went on.

Naismith told Earth.com that each coin was worth tens of modern dollars and was relatively rare in the tenth century.

"People would not have lost them lightly," he said. "So, to find this many in one place suggests these coins were being used intensively, for lots of transactions. In other words, this was a vibrant area."

Papal coins were the rule

Written records from Rome in this period mention only papal money, and the historians read that as the rule.

Foreign coin was not normally acceptable, and one ninth-century letter mentions a Frankish abbot who worried about changing his currency before a trip to the city.

English silver pennies have turned up in Rome before. One in a hoard from the House of the Vestals in the Forum, and another near the Vatican Radio station.

Until now, though, none had come from the heart of the English quarter itself, the Schola Saxonum, which texts place in this area from the late eighth century.

"The coins aren't pretty but they have a lot to say," Naismith said.

"More Anglo-Saxon coins from this period have now been found in Rome than papal coins. This sounds bizarre, but it's telling us that a very large amount of money was flowing in from England at this time."

A privilege granted to Alfred

The dates give the historians a clue. The Rome finds cluster between about 900 and 970. That is before the English began the annual payment to the pope known as Peter's Pence, so the coins are unlikely to be pious offerings.

What was happening instead, Naismith and Tinti suggest, is a deal. Alfred the Great sent alms to Rome in 883 and again in the late 880s.

At Alfred's request, Pope Marinus I freed the English quarter "from every tribute and toll," according to Asser, the Welsh scholar who wrote Alfred's biography in 893.

No surviving source spells out what that privilege covered. The pair propose that the right to spend English money was part of it.

The use of English coin in Rome faded around the 970s, and the historians aren't sure why.

One possibility they raise is that the popes stopped minting their own coins at about that time. The privilege may have depended on the popes actively running the local money system.

What remains unknown

The findings appear as a chapter, written in Italian, in the proceedings of a conference held at Roma Tre University in December 2025. The full catalog of the coins is still to come.

Nobody knows how large the English quarter was, or whether Alfred himself secured the currency arrangement. Asser's line is the only written hint, and the historians call it a possibility rather than a proof.

Asked by Earth.com what comes next, Naismith said more digging on neighboring sites would be ideal. In a city like Rome, he said, the chance only comes when building or utility work opens the ground, as the hotel project did here.

"The church of S. Spirito in Sassia would be especially interesting to look into further," he said. Until that ground opens, the coins and craft debris from one garden are the only physical trace of the English quarter anyone has seen.

The full study has not been published in a journal. It appears as a chapter in the book of conference proceedings titled Rome and the Others (300-1000), published by SAP Società Archeologica (ISBN: 9791256820405).

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