 Coinage never petered out as completely as it did below the Humber, and until close to the end of its history Northumbrian coinage remained closely linked to the king and archbishop.However, debasement became a serious issue around the end of the 8th century, when numismatists begin to apply the term "stycas" to Northumbrian coinage (based on a 10th-century gloss in the Lindisfarne Gospels; contemporary terminology is unknown).Both the political and the numismatic chronology of this period is very confused, with many accounts and suggestions competing with one another.