Abstract
This paper, written by a specialist of the economic history of the Western Middle Ages, aims to give an illustration of the positive roll which small value money could play in economic growth, the case being taken from the silver monometalism from the end of the 7th until the middle of the 13th century. The denarius (penny), only type of money coined by Western mints during this period, was well adaptive to the needs of the time, because of its small value compared to that of the gold coins prevailing in the preceding age or in the contemporary Islamic and Byzantine worlds. As to the Western countries of this age, there are various evidences of social and economic development at local or regional levels, which stimulated the use of money even among peasants and artisans. Having traced the historiography of European countries towards this positive appreciation of the medieval silver monometallism, the author approaches some problems, particularly related to the function of denorius in favour of economic growth, around its birth in the Merovingian period, its institutional consolidation under Carolingian kings and its regional adaptation in the 10th and 11th centuries.
