Hypothesis; Lack of Coins Does Not Imply Barter

The common assumption that early medieval societies without widespread standardised coinage, such as Britain from c. 450-750 AD, relied primarily on barter is poorly supported by archaeological or ethnographic evidence.

Anthropological research has thoroughly debunked the idea of pure barter economies. As Caroline Humphrey concluded in her 1985 article ‘Barter and Economic Disintegration’ “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

David Graeber popularised this finding in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, arguing that non-monetized communities typically rely on credit and debt arrangements, gift economies, or standardized objects that function as media of exchange, portable, useful items with broadly recognised value. These objects effectively serve the role of money, even if not minted coins. Labeling such systems “barter” misrepresents the social structures involved and overlooks practical adaptations.

Graeber further observed that actual barter, when it does occur, almost never takes place within communities between neighbours or people with ongoing relationships. Instead, it ordinarily happens between strangers or even enemies, often in contexts of low trust, and can carry negative connotations of distrust or exploitation.

Societies standardise around convenient goods: cowrie shells in parts of Africa and Asia, glass beads in some regions, or metal buttons elsewhere. I speculate that metal buttons where the precursor of coins, not just from the fact that they predate coins and they are visually similar. But also that standardise coinage usually is the result of trying to facilitate taxation or military payments. So when you need to standardise something you start usually from something that already exist and generalise on that thing.

In early Anglo-Saxon Britain, small copper-alloy button brooches, durable fasteners made of valued material, appear frequently in various contexts, including graves, homes, workshops, and rural settlements, as witnessed by excavations and metal-detected finds, they could easily have facilitated small, everyday transactions, especially among unrelated people.

For larger or formal exchanges, gold or silver jewellery, such as rings, earrings, brooches, and armlets, likely played a similar role, sometimes fragmented by weight as bullion in related periods.

I can only think of one circumstance where barter is more common, and that would be in cases of swapping animals with further-afield neighbours, for example bulls, so that both benefit from “fresh” blood since the purpose is you are swapping like for like.

In all other circumstances, I would say that a lack of minted coins does not mean a regressive barter economy. When formal coinage was scarce, people innovated with what was at hand, items like button brooches, to keep commerce flowing. This pattern recurs across history: humans are resourceful, and past societies were as organisationally capable as our own.