Could I ask your source for this statement, because it seems completely wrong to me? The late Anglo-Saxons had an extraordinarily efficient mint system that produced vast quantities of silver pennies of exceptional purity, then re-coined the entire money supply every three years to control fraud. While contemporary chronicles can't necessarily be taken as gospel when it comes to amounts, payments of Danegeld (essentially bribes made to viking raiders to persuade them to leave England alone) recorded in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle apparently totalled somewhere in the region of 75-100,000 kilos of silver coinage, all in the form of these silver pennies – implying the export of literally millions of coins, all while leaving sufficient currency in circulation to maintain the English economy.

I'm afraid it's really quite untrue to say that England minted little money. Early Medieval England was a particularly heavily monetised economy for the period, and one which put great political and cultural emphasis on its coinage. Indeed, 9th and 10th Century English coinage in particular was something of an international standard; extensive hoard finds from throughout Scandinavia and along the East coast of Ireland suggest that English silver pennies were the currency of choice for a large proportion of Hiberno-Norse and Norse merchants. English coinage was renowned for its consistency and high silver content, making it particularly reliable when compared, for example, to Frankish contemporaries. Indeed there is numismatic evidence that foreign coinage was seized and checked by port reeves; that of a suitable troy grain weight was restamped while underweight coinage was melted down and exchanged. There's also considerable numismatic evidence of Danelaw imitations of late 9th Century London issues from Danelaw merchants trying to buy into the monetised economy.

While a level of barter economy almost necessarily existed, the 10th Centiry English penny was in fact frequently designed to be used in low-value transactions, with reverse markings - especially on 'long cross' pennies - specifically for the coin to be split into halfpenny and farthing values. While the overwhelming majority of extant specimens come from hoards, there is also a huge corpus of single finds spread in a diverse pattern across the country. While hoards are excellent for establishing the types, makes and sheer number of specimens of any issue ans period, their spatial data is usually illustrative of a more 'elite' use - typically manorial funds or merchants' reserves - single finds are excellent for illustrating the scope of monetisation. Typically found by metal detectorists, gardeners or builders, they typically represent 'casual' losses; coins which slip from a pocket on the walk home, a dropped purse or fumbled change, rather than purposeful deposition, and so show us where and how coinage was being carried or changing hands. If you're interested, I actually used the corpus of single find 10th Century English coinage to map the spread of liquidity and trade in post-reconquest England as part of my thesis which you can access here

What they didn't have much of in Early Medieval England is gold coinage. I talked a bit here and here about the mancus and its frustratingly confusing role as both a unit of value and as a periodically issued, probably ceremonial coin. I also briefly touched here on the introduction of functional golden coinage by Edward III in the 14th Century which I would argue is only really on the cusp of Late Medieval. Mayve.

I always recommend Dumville and Blackburn's Kings, Currency and Alliances, and basically anything by Rory Naismith.