Ingots: metal cast for storage and payment

An ingot is metal cast into a simple shape so that it can be stored, carried, weighed and later turned into something else. In a hoard, ingots are the clearest sign that the owner thought of silver or gold as raw value rather than as objects. They are also the hardest finds to date on their own, since a plain bar looks much the same in any century; most are dated by the coins and ornaments buried with them.

The late Roman state handled silver in stamped bars. The Kaiseraugst treasure from Switzerland, buried in the mid-4th century, includes three silver ingots stamped with the portrait and name of the usurper Magnentius (350-353) and the mark P III, three Roman pounds, roughly a kilogram each. In Britain, silver ingots of a flat 'double-axe' shape, some stamped with the name of the workshop that made them, date from the late 4th and early 5th centuries and are thought to have been used to pay officials and soldiers.

The great age of the ingot in north-west Europe was the Viking age. Silver from coins, plate and jewellery was melted down and poured into open moulds, often of soapstone or clay, giving a bar that is round, rectangular or roughly triangular in section, with rounded ends. Susan Kruse's study of cast ingots from England and Wales found weights from 2 g to 283 g, with a cluster at 20-30 g and a possible loose unit of about 25-26 g. The 29 cigar-shaped ingots in the Bedale hoard from North Yorkshire weigh between about 48 g and 144 g each; some have their ends chopped off, and one is cut with 16 test nicks. On Gotland, the Spillings hoard holds bundles of silver bars alongside its coins and arm-rings.

Signs to look for: a smooth upper surface that sank slightly as the metal cooled, pitting from a sand or stone mould, tapering rounded ends, and clean cut faces where a piece was taken off for payment. Knife-nicks along the edges show that the bar passed through several hands, each buyer testing that it was solid silver and not plated.

Ingots matter because they hide their origins in plain sight. Once coins were melted, their mint marks were gone, but their chemistry was not. A 2025 study of the Bedale ingots used lead isotopes and trace elements to show that some were cast from western European silver, some from Islamic dirhams and many from a mixture, which tells historians how loot and trade silver were pooled in Viking Yorkshire. In the Bronze Age Mediterranean, by contrast, copper travelled as heavy 'oxhide' slabs of about 20-30 kg, a reminder that ingots served trade in base metals too.