At the date of Ethelbert’s Laws (A.D. 596) the Merovingian currency was still mainly gold—i.e. gold tremisses, three of which went to the gold solidus of the Salic Laws. And if the scilling of Ethelbert, like the solidus of the Franks, had been a solidus of forty denarii we might have concluded at once that Ethelbert’s scilling, like the Merovingian solidus, was a solidus of three gold tremisses, or forty silver sceatts.
But the facts apparently will not allow us to come to this conclusion.
Schmid has shown—I think, conclusively—by inference from certain passages in Ethelbert’s Laws, that the Kentish scilling was of twenty scætts instead of forty.[290] We therefore must deal with the Kentish scilling on its own evidence.
Now, twenty sceatts of 28·8 wheat-grains, as we have seen, made the Roman ounce of 576 wheat-grains. The Kentish scilling was therefore the equivalent of an ounce of silver. And so in the Kentish laws, so far as reckoning in silver was concerned, the same method was adopted as that of the Welsh, who reckoned in scores or unciæ of silver, and that which became the common Frankish and Norman reckoning of twenty pence to the ounce and twelve ounces to the pound.
Indeed, when we consider that under common Scandinavian custom gold and silver were weighed and reckoned in marks, ores, and ortugs, it would seem natural that the Kentish immigrants from the North should have been already familiar with a reckoning in ores or ounces of silver.
But why did they call the ounce of silver a scilling? We might as well perhaps ask why the Wessex scilling was five pence and the Mercian scilling four pence. But the word scilling had, as we have seen, been used by the Goths in Italy for the gold solidus. And on the Continent the gold solidus in the sixth and seventh centuries, and indeed till the time of Charlemagne, was so far the recognised symbol of value that the wergelds of the Northern tribes, whether they remained in the north or emigrated southwards, were invariably stated in their laws in gold solidi. The most natural inference would therefore seem to be that the Kentish scilling, like that of the Salic law, must have been a gold solidus equated, however, in account with twenty silver pence or scætts.
The Kentish scilling probably a solidus of two gold tremisses like the Saxon solidus.
Now, at the ratio of 1:10 the ore or ounce of twenty silver scætts would equal a gold solidus of two gold tremisses instead of three.[291] And when it is considered that the main Merovingian currency on the other side of the Channel was of gold tremisses it seems natural that the ounce of silver should be equated with an even number of gold tremisses.
Nor would there be anything unprecedented or unusual in a gold solidus of two tremisses instead of three. For we have seen that when Charlemagne conquered the Frisians and the Saxons, he found that the solidi in which they had traditionally paid their wergelds were not always, like the Imperial and the Salic solidi, of three gold tremisses, but that each district had its own peculiar solidus. The solidus of the southern division of Frisia was of two and a half gold tremisses. The solidus of the middle district was the ordinary gold solidus of three tremisses. The traditional solidus of the district presumably nearest to the Jutes, i.e. on both the Frisian and the Saxon side of the Weser, was the solidus of two tremisses. The Saxon solidus of two tremisses, representing the one-year-old bullock, was that in which according to the Lex Saxonum the Saxon wergelds had been traditionally paid.