Archaeologists digging a short walk from the Vatican have found 20 Anglo-Saxon coins, the first material evidence of the Schola Saxonum, a medieval English community that lived and worked beside St. Peter’s more than a thousand years ago.
The coins came out of an excavation that began in 2020 beneath the walled garden of the Palazzo della Rovere. The site made international news in 2023 with the announcement of a structure identified as Emperor Nero’s theater. It is the medieval layers above and around that ruin that have now produced the English material.
Written sources have long placed the Schola Saxonum in this corner of Rome from at least the second half of the eighth century, on land between the Vatican and the Tiber. It was no school in the modern sense. Institutions of its kind gave foreign pilgrims lodging, religious services, charity and practical help after journeys that could take weeks, and the Franks, Lombards and Frisians kept their own nearby. Traces survive on the map. The riverside road Lungotevere in Sassia is named for the Saxons, and the Santo Spirito in Sassia hospital still carries the district’s charitable tradition. Until now, texts and place names held nearly the whole story.
English ties to Rome run deeper still. Pope Gregory I organized the mission that helped convert the Anglo-Saxons in the late sixth century. Offa of Mercia reportedly sent Rome an annual payment of 365 gold pieces in the late eighth, and Alfred the Great sent alms and kept up diplomatic contact. By the 10th century the contributions later known as Peter’s Pence tied English households to the city, a practice King Canute carried into the 11th.
The new group consists of 19 silver pennies and one halfpenny, struck at English mints over roughly four decades under Edward the Elder, Athelstan and Eadred and traced to East Anglia, Kent, London and the West Midlands. Fourteen turned up in rubbish pits, in two clusters of six to eight coins. After about a thousand years underground, several had fused together. The rest lay scattered nearby.
The coins would not impress a collector. Their context is what counts. Archaeologists have now identified more Anglo-Saxon coins from this period in Rome than papal ones, said Rory Naismith, a professor of early medieval English history at the University of Cambridge who studied the finds. That points to real volumes of English money reaching the city, not a curiosity carried by one rich traveler. The lone halfpenny matters too, because small change turns up where people buy ordinary things.
The same trenches yielded coins from the Roman period and 10th-century Italian money, including a papal coin. That mix raises the possibility that English and papal currency circulated side by side in the district rather than one replacing the other.
The coins were not alone. Across at least 3,000 square meters, the dig found traces of leatherworking, boneworking and metalworking, the marks of workshops, tools and customers. This was no simple hostel for pilgrims on their way to the basilica. Mr. Naismith has suggested that hundreds of people may have lived there permanently or semi-permanently, craftsmen from towns like Winchester, London and York who opened workshops and plied familiar trades on the banks of the Tiber.
Why the English could spend their own money in Rome is the puzzle the coins pose. Roman documents of the period usually speak of papal coinage, and one ninth-century Frankish abbot wrote about the chore of arranging currency exchange before traveling to the city. The English coins lay scattered through working and domestic areas, with no sign they had been gathered for melting down. Writing with Francesca Tinti, a historian, and the archaeologists Marzia Di Mento, Valentina Pica and Filippo Salamone in a new Italian-language volume, Rome and the Others (300-1000): Foreigners in the City Between Conflicts and Integration, Mr. Naismith argues the English may have held privileges other foreign communities lacked, though the authors stop short of calling it proven, Cambridge said. One document hangs over the question. According to Asser, the biographer of Alfred the Great, Pope Marinus I freed the Schola Saxonum from “every tribute and toll” in 883 after Alfred asked for special treatment for the English. That does not prove Alfred also won permission for English coins to circulate in Rome. But the coins that surfaced in the digging were issued by his son and grandsons.