Little England Existed: Anglo-Saxon Coins Prove It

Imagine paying with your home currency while living hundreds of kilometers from home — no exchange fees, no travel-money hassle. About a thousand years ago, English expats in Rome did exactly that. Archaeologists digging beneath a walled garden near the Vatican have uncovered a cache of Anglo-Saxon coins that proves Little England was real: a medieval English enclave by the Tiber, known in Latin as the Schola Saxonum, where English money changed hands openly, apparently with the Pope's blessing.

The haul is small but history-making: twenty silver coins — nineteen pennies and one exceptionally rare halfpenny — struck in England over about four decades in the names of three tenth-century kings: Edward the Elder (899–924), his son Æthelstan (924–939), and his other son Eadred (946–955). According to the University of Cambridge report on the discovery, researchers traced the Little England money to mints in East Anglia, Kent, London, and the West Midlands.

Fourteen of the coins were found fused together in two clusters in ancient rubbish pits — silver pressed into clumps by a millennium underground — while the rest lay scattered nearby. The team also recovered ten Roman and Italian coins from the period, including a single papal piece, plus traces of leather, bone, and metal craftwork. That everyday mix is the giveaway: these coins were dropped by shoppers and craftspeople in a working neighborhood, not buried as a hoard — the first physical traces of Little England.

The dig that began with Nero's theatre

Excavations started in 2020 beneath the garden of the Palazzo della Rovere, steps from St Peter's, directed by the Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio di Roma and carried out by the firm MDM Archeologia under supervisors Renato Sebastiani and Alessio De Cristofaro. Three years later the site made global headlines with the ruins of Emperor Nero's theatre. The same ground has now yielded something quieter and arguably more revealing: hard evidence for a community previously known only from manuscripts.

For the two scholars who studied the Little England coins, that proof was a long time coming. "The coins aren't pretty but they have a lot to say," says Rory Naismith, a Cambridge professor of early medieval English history. More Anglo-Saxon coins from this period have now surfaced in Rome than papal ones, he notes — a sign that very large sums were flowing in from England at the time. His collaborator Francesca Tinti, a medieval historian, says: "Before this big discovery, we never had any material remains of the English quarter in Rome." Her team had hoped for a moment like this for most of their careers.

Their findings were announced in early October 2026 in a new Italian book on foreigners in Rome between the years 300 and 1000. Reported by Nautilus, the Little England research argues the quarter was far more than a pilgrims' hostel — it was a thriving, privileged community.

Why pocket change proved Little England real

Medieval texts have long mentioned an Anglo-Saxon quarter in this part of Rome: two ninth-century fires were recorded there, and its residents worshipped at a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary — the burial place, tradition holds, of King Burgred of Mercia, driven out of England by the Vikings. But written records can only say so much, and until now historians had no physical trace of the settlement at all.

That absence is what makes the coins so disruptive. Documents from the period refer only to papal coinage in Rome, and other travelers fretted about changing money — a ninth-century Frankish abbot, for one, worried in a letter about converting his currency before heading south. Yet here is English money being spent by the Tiber. Naismith points out that other foreign coins from this period simply do not turn up in Rome: no Frankish pieces, barely any from northern Italy. This looks like a specifically English arrangement — the Little England quarter operating with a privilege no other expat community enjoyed.

The special treatment fits a long paper trail. Offa of Mercia instituted an annual payment of gold pieces to keep Rome's church candles lit; Alfred the Great sent frequent alms in the late ninth century; in 883 Pope Marinus I freed the Saxon School from every tribute and toll at Alfred's request — though the researchers caution this does not prove Alfred himself secured the currency deal. By the tenth century, England's Peter's Pence was sending Rome a penny per household, and in 1027 King Canute came to Rome in person to negotiate financial benefits for English pilgrims. The coins show the human side of that diplomacy: craftspeople and traders from Winchester, London, and York keeping a miniature Anglo-Saxon town running — probably hundreds of residents who called the Little England quarter home.

History's first English expat neighborhood

A fair counterpoint: this many coins cannot map an entire neighborhood's economy, and a scattered set of silver could simply be what happened to survive. But the pattern argues otherwise. The pieces were found singly and in small clusters amid workshop debris — the signature of everyday spending, not buried savings — and the team found no sign of silver being melted down to be remade as local money. As reported by Scienmag, the researchers conclude this was a thriving, privileged community that kept its own money — a claim that texts alone could never have settled.

For a generation fluent in expats, digital nomads, and multi-currency apps, the Little England story lands close to home: the first English neighborhood abroad, with its own church, its own workshops, and a currency deal its French neighbors could only envy. The quarter may have begun as a charitable hostel for Saxon pilgrims around the year 727; after a thousand years of silence, a little pocket change proves it grew into something far bigger. For more on how fresh evidence keeps rewriting the ancient past, see this Old World report on a new Hittite archive from Turkey that reveals an empire at war, and browse the Old World topic page for the section's latest.