Brian is a teddy bear who lives with Mia and her family in a fictional Somerset village. One day they all go to a party at a neighbour's and after a game of hide and seek, Mia leaves Brian hidden in a tree. Afterwards Mia can't find the tree she's hidden him in, and he has to stay there all night...

Brian the Bear belongs to a little girl called Mia. One day she takes him to a garden party, but sadly he gets left behind and becomes lost in the woods. he is found first by a family of badgers, who look after him. Then he is picked up by a dog, and taken to a new home. One day he is going over the hill to the next village with his new family. Hettie the dog is carrying him, but then she drops him when she goes off to chase a rabbit. Poor Brian is left overnight out in the snow. Next morning, Mia his original owner is walking over the hill with her family. Miraculously she hears Brian cry out as she walks past, sees him in the snow, and they are reunited. Mia and Brian then spend a very happy white Christmas with each other!

This, the first volume of Medieval European Coinage, surveys the coinage of Western Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century to the emergence of recognizable 'national' political units in the tenth. It starts with the Vandals, Visigoths, Burgundians and other Germanic invaders of the Empire, whose coins were modelled on contemporary issues of the Western or Eastern emperors. The coinage of the Franks is followed from early Merovingian times through to the establishment and subsequent fragmentation of the Carolingian empire. Italy is represented by the coinages of the Ostrogoths, Lombards, Carolingians and popes down to the Ottoman conquest in the mid-tenth century. The coinage of the Anglo-Saxons is traced from the introduction of minting in the early seventh century to the emergence of a united kingdom during the first half of the tenth century, including the aberrant coinages of Northumbria and the Anglo-Viking coinages of the Danelaw.