Twenty coins minted by Alfred the Great’s heirs turned up beside the Vatican

Nineteen silver pennies and one halfpenny, all struck in Anglo-Saxon England, have been dug out of rubbish pits in Rome, a few steps from St Peter’s. The 20 coins were minted over about four decades under three kings: Edward the Elder, the son of Alfred the Great, and Alfred’s grandsons Æthelstan and Eadred.

They came from beneath the walled garden of the Palazzo della Rovere, where excavations began in 2020. Cambridge historian Rory Naismith: “The coins aren’t pretty but they have a lot to say.”

Three kings and four mints

The University of Cambridge’s account dates the Anglo-Saxon coins to Edward the Elder (reigned 899 to 924), Æthelstan (924 to 939) and Eadred (946 to 955). The identifiable pieces were struck in East Anglia, Kent, London and the West Midlands, so the money came from across the English kingdom and not from a single port or mint town.

The halfpenny is the oddity. It is a rare denomination for the period, and the researchers connect it to trading hubs with plenty of low-value exchange, according to Cambridge. Ten more coins from the same contexts are Roman or tenth-century Italian, and one newly identified piece is papal, which hints that English and papal money circulated side by side. Fourteen of the English coins lay in rubbish pits, in two clusters of six and eight that have corroded into fused lumps, while the other six were scattered nearby. Medievalists.net lists the authors of the chapter as Marzia Di Mento, Naismith, Valentina Pica, Filippo Salamone and Tinti, and adds that the full excavation recovered 30 coins from five archaeological contexts, of which 20 are Anglo-Saxon.

Craft work and a vanished English quarter

The find sits in what medieval texts call the Schola Saxonum, an Anglo-Saxon quarter inside Rome’s Leonine City that is mentioned from the second half of the eighth century. The texts record two ninth-century fires there and a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, where King Burgred of Mercia was reportedly buried after his exile. Place names still carry the memory: the Lungotevere in Sassia road and the Santo Spirito in Sassia hospital.

Cambridge says the excavation also turned up evidence of leather, bone and metal working across a craft area of at least 3,000 square metres. Because no sign of silver being melted down was found, the researchers read the coins as money lost in trade and shopping, not bullion converted into local currency. They estimate a permanent community of hundreds of people who made and sold goods as well as visiting shrines.

The report in Archaeology Magazine frames the same point: scholars had known of the enclave for generations from place names and texts, but physical traces were scarce. Naismith told the magazine the discovery shows “a very large amount of money was flowing in from England at this time” and, in the words the magazine reports, that more Anglo-Saxon coins from the period have now turned up in Rome than papal coins.

English money in a city that discouraged foreign cash

The coins bear on an old assumption that the papacy banned foreign currency in Rome. Cambridge cites a ninth-century letter in which a Frankish abbot frets over how to exchange money before a trip to the city, while English visitors appear to have been exempt. Franks, Lombards and Frisians also kept institutions near St Peter’s, but the Anglo-Saxons left the most traces and seem to have held special privileges, including documented burial rights in the area.

Alfred’s own biographer, Asser, records that Pope Marinus freed the Schola from tribute and toll in 883. The researchers say that does not prove Alfred arranged a currency deal, but they consider it possible. Their wider backdrop runs from Pope Gregory the Great’s mission to the English in the late sixth century to Offa of Mercia’s annual payment of 365 gold pieces to keep Rome’s church candles lit.

Tinti told Smithsonian that the English in Rome were “quite unique,” and Cambridge reports her saying the team had hoped for such a discovery for most of their careers.

The 2026 book chapter behind the find

There is no journal paper behind the find. Tinti and Naismith interpreted the coins in a chapter of Rome and the Others (300-1000): Foreigners in the City Between Conflicts and Integration, an Italian-language book published in 2026. The dig was directed by the Soprintendenza Speciale di Roma and supervised scientifically by Renato Sebastiani and Alessio De Cristofaro, with fieldwork coordinated by Marzia Di Mento and a preliminary coin study by Cecilia de Leone.

The coins and other finds are the property of the Italian state, and Cambridge does not say where they will be displayed. NationalWorld also reports that the 20 English pieces span roughly four decades across the three reigns. Gizmodo likewise notes that the English were allowed to use their own currency near the pope.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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