Book contents
21 - Coinage in Andrew Halyburton's Ledger
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
Summary
Andrew Halyburton's Ledger is the account book of a Scottish commission merchant based at Middelburg in the Netherlands which records transactions made between 1492 and 1504. It was edited by Cosmo Innes as long ago as 1867 but, although well known to Scottish historians as a source of information about trade in native commodities and imported luxuries, its numismatic potential has remained unexploited. The reason for this has been the difficulty encountered in identifying the many different and often strangely-named coin denominations present, but the publication of Professor Grierson's work on the Coinage in the Cely Papers has now provided the key to their solution. The present essay, thus made possible by one of his own papers, is offered as a tribute to Professor Grierson, whose work has opened up new avenues of approach to previously intractable problems in every one of the series covered by his wide numismatic interests.
The accounts in Halyburton's ledger are usually cast in Flemish money, but he notes sums in English money in three late entries: in 1500 (pp. 225 and 226) and 1501 (p. 227). Scottish money naturally appears more frequently, on fourteen occasions between March 1495 (p. 11) and 1502 (p. 268).
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- Information
- Studies in Numismatic MethodPresented to Philip Grierson, pp. 263 - 302Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983