Coin, nummus

A copper alloy nummus of Magnus Maximus. Maximus rebelled against Emperor Gratian in 383 CE, and had himself proclaimed emperor. The following year his claims to Britain and Gaul (France) were recognised by Emperor Theodosian I, and he ruled as Emperor of the Western Empire from 384 to 388 CE. The back of the coin depicts a military camp gate. This is one of comparatively few coins that were minted for Maximus in Rome, Italy, AD 387-388.

Front (obverse): Diademed bust of Magnus Maximus, facing right. Inscription: Illegible.
Back (reverse): A military camp gate, with two towers and a star above. Inscription: [SPES ROMANORVM], 'Hope of the Romans'. The letters RP below the line at the bottom, indicate that the coin was minted in Rome.

This coin is one of over 300 [Roman coins that were found during building work on a site in Bermondsey in 1946, hidden away in a small ceramic bottle. The coins were presumably the savings of somebody who buried them for safe keeping but who, for a reason we shall never know, did not return to recover them.

The coins were not of high value at the time: the equivalent of modern pennies put in a money box. Nevertheless they are interesting because many of them can be dated to the 380s and 390s CE. This is at the very end of the period during which Britain was part of the Roman empire. Coin hoards of this date are not common. Perhaps the bottle was left behind simply because, once Roman government had come to an end, coins no longer had much value and were less often used in everyday transactions.

The hoard is also important because we have very few Roman finds of any type from this part of Bermondsey. In Roman times the site was probably a small island of higher ground among mudflats and river channels, but we have no specific details about the type of habitation there.