23rd November 2025 - Dr Elina Screen, Presidential address: "Britain and the sea in the first millennium, 4: Commerce and contacts with the Baltic."

24th March 2025 - Dr Jane Kershaw, Silver and the Origins of the Viking Age: implications for coinage from the east and west. 

In this talk, I will reflect on a recently-completed 5-year ERC-funded project examining the origin of silver in the Viking Age. Through large-scale lead isotope and trace element analyses, the project tracked flows of silver entering Scandinavia from the Islamic east, as well as western Europe, identifying regional patterns and establishing a new chronology for the arrival in the north of Islamic silver. I will ask what the implications are for contemporary coinage in particular, both within Scandinavia and in overseas territories the Scandinavians settled. I will link the production of Islamic dirhams to particular mining regions, and argue that dirhams arrived in Scandinavia in significant volumes in the ninth century. Turning to the west, I will examine the sources of silver making up Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon coinage in the ninth century, and demonstrate how and where these coinages were melted down and cast into objects. Tracing patterns in the geochemical data sometimes reveals networks and wealth sources not otherwise recorded. 

Dr Jane Kershaw is the Gad Rausing Associate Professor in Archaeology at the University of Oxford. She researches different aspects of the Viking-Age economy, with a focus on metalwork, silver and other forms of currency.

25th November 2024 - Dr Elina Screen, Presidential address: "Britain and the sea in the first millennium, 3: currency, contacts and conflict in the Irish Sea." 

From ancient times Britain and Ireland have been very aware of their island character, but the seas around the British Isles have always connected as much as divided. Peoples, objects and ideas – including coins and the concept of coinage – have all travelled to and fro. Indeed, coin finds offer important evidence for these movements and contacts. This series of lectures will explore the contacts and influences on coin use in Britain in the first millennium, taking an approach inspired by global history, which sees the sea as a space of connectivity. This lecture turns to the Irish Sea, and focuses on encounters and exchanges in the Viking Age, when the sea routes that criss-cross the Irish Sea brought both opportunities and risks to Britain and Ireland. Developments in the coinage and use of silver reflect these encounters and the emergence of new concepts of value.

22 January 2024 - Martin Jennings  - who designed and modelled the effigy of King Charles III for the new coinage. In this talk he discusses the process of making this, the smallest of his public sculptures, as well as some of the largest, including his statues of John Betjeman at St Pancras Station, George Orwell at the BBC and Mary Seacole at St Thomas's Hospital, comparing and contrasting the demands placed on him by the scale of the finished work.

27 November 2023: Dr Elina Screen's Presidential Address,

Britain and the sea in the first millennium, 2: Coins and the coasts of the North Sea.

January 2023: Jennifer Adams, Slavery & the Bank: the Bank of England's links with transatlantic slavery.