Earliest coinage of Java found in the Thames

I have often wandered through the British Museum and marvelled at how much material has been recovered from the Thames. And it is still turning up:

Earlier this year a mudlark found what must have seemed a disappointing return for a morning spent scouring the mudbanks of the Thames: a fistful of coins, legally qualifying as treasure but of diabolical quality.

The salvagers, known as mudlarks, who patrol every twist and turn of the river and its banks at low tide, find masses of coins every year, mostly fallen from modern pockets, or obsolete English coins which are still very common.

These ones turned out to be extremely rare: the British Museum, which has one of the best coin collections in the world, only has six of them. The heap of stained copper alloy was first thought to be Chinese coins, but proved to be the earliest coins ever minted in Java, almost certainly produced as a direct result of British trade.

It seems the coins came from Bantam, "which became fabulously rich from its location on the safest straits with the best deep water moorings between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea."

The East India Company established the first trading post and factory in the first decade of the 17th century, but were forced out by the Dutch in 1621. Ms Forsyth assumes the coins came to London in this first period of English trade.

Before that, Chinese copper coins - strung together as these coins may originally have been - were used in Java, and these earliest locally-produced coins imitated their shape. The city grew so wealthy that a five-mile wall surrounded it - "far, far larger than London was at that date".

From the Guardian.

Posted by David on December 1, 2003 5:33 PM