Viking-age hoards

In May 1840 workmen repairing an embankment of the River Ribble near Preston broke open a lead box holding more than 8,600 pieces of silver: coins, ingots, arm-rings, chopped brooches and fragments. The Cuerdale Hoard weighs between about 32 and 40 kg, depending on whose account you follow, and was probably buried in the first decade of the 900s, around the time the Vikings were driven out of Dublin. Only one Viking hoard is bigger. In 1999 a field at Spillings on Gotland gave up two deposits under the floor of a building, about 67 kg of silver in all, with 14,295 coins, mostly Islamic, and nearly 500 arm-rings, buried some time after 870. Gotland alone has produced more than 700 hoards of the ninth to twelfth centuries, over a tonne of silver and about 168,000 coins from the Islamic world.

These hoards are the archive of a bullion economy. In most of the Viking world silver passed by weight, not by count, so a coin from Baghdad, a cut bar and a section of a Frankish brooch were all simply silver, and many pieces carry small nicks where someone tested the metal beneath the surface. Traders carried folding scales and sets of weights; a set from a burial on the island of Gigha suggests a system built on a unit of about 12.5 g. Plain arm-rings from Scotland and the Isle of Man cluster around 24 g, the weight of the Norwegian øre or ounce, and may have worked as portable savings. Where the Vikings met a coin-using state, as in England, the two systems met in the same hoard: Cuerdale mixes coins from the Viking kingdoms of eastern England with Wessex issues and foreign coins in proportions of about 5:1:1. The weight explorer compares hoards with Anglo-Saxon livestock prices of the 930s.

Why so much silver stayed in the ground is a live question. A thirteenth-century Icelandic text offers one answer: in Snorri Sturluson's Ynglinga saga, Odin decrees that the dead should be burned with their goods, so that each will come to Valhalla 'with the riches he had with him upon the pile; and he would also enjoy whatever he himself had buried in the earth' (Laing's 1844 translation). That is a late, literary source, written two centuries after the period it describes, and most specialists treat Viking hoards as savings, payments and loot, hidden in unsettled times and never reclaimed. The care taken over some deposits fits either reading: the Vale of York Hoard, buried around 927-928, packed 617 coins and 65 other objects into a gilt silver cup inside a lead container.

The heaviest concentrations lie on the Baltic islands, above all Gotland, and around the Irish Sea and the road between Dublin and York along which Cuerdale's owners travelled. Newer finds still change the picture, and the best of them were recorded properly: the two detectorists who found the Vale of York Hoard in 2007 kept the cup and its contents intact, noted the find-spot and reported it to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which is why so much could be learned from it.