becoming organized. The steady and orderly replacement of gold by silver in the Merovingian coinage, culminating in a completely silver coinage by the 660s, has been seen by some as an attempt to provide a coinage more suited to commercial transactions. The Frankish king, Dagobert, was clearly trying to encourage trade when he granted Saint-Denis the right to hold an annual fair. And there are trading-places in the midseventh century which are clearly becoming important. Many are characterized by a place-name suffix meaning 'tradingplace': -wic or its local equivalent. There was Quentovic on the north French coast, Wijk bij Duurstede (or Dorestad) in the Netherlands, Schleswig in Jutland, Hamwic ( Southampton), Eoforwic ( York), and, some twelve kilometres from Sutton Hoo, Ipswich. Early medieval pottery has been found on many sites in modern Ipswich, which may indicate a sizeable settlement area; from the evidence of the pottery one might imagine peaks of activity in the early seventh century (in the time of Rædwald and Sigbert) and again around 800. Much of this pottery is imported from the Rhineland, and there are fragments of Rhenish glass also, and numerous boat rivets. Some archaeologists believe that Ipswich, and other wics in the seventh century, may have been seasonal ports of trade, established by kings to control the flow of prestige goods, such as wine or luxury cloths, into their kingdom. Kings did this for a twofold purpose, presumably: to benefit from tolls and to obtain a monopoly of items with which to reward followers and subjects, thus in both ways increasing their power.
As we move from Ireland to East Anglia to Francia there is a dramatic increase in scale. There were over a hundred Irish kings reigning in any one year during the time of Rædwald, each of them with a kingdom the size of a half or third of a modern county. And as we move south again across the Channel we witness another great leap in scale. Although Rædwald's armies could take him hundreds of miles from East Anglia, to force other kings to submit to him and offer him tribute, his own kingdom was very small in comparison with Dagobert's, confined as far as we can see largely to the coastal regions of East Anglia. Dagobert's power stretched over the
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