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By Root 2827 0

imagination, and their reputation has fluctuated violently. In the nineteenth century, the British saw them as savage bad guys – horn-helmeted rapers and looters. For the Scandinavians, of course, it was different: the Vikings there were the all-conquering heroes of Nordic legend. The Vikings then went through a stage of being seen by historians as rather civilized – more tradesmen and travellers than pillagers. The recent discovery of the Vale of York hoard makes them seem a little less cuddly and looks set to revive the aggressive Vikings of popular tradition, but now with a dash of cosmopolitan glamour. The truth is that that’s what the Vikings have always been about: glitz with violence.

The England of the early 900s was divided between territories occupied by the Vikings – most of the north and the east – and the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, in the south and the west. The reconquest of the Viking territories by the Anglo-Saxons was the key event of tenth-century Britain, and our treasure both pinpoints one tiny part of this national epic and connects it to the immense world of Viking trade.

The hoard was found in the winter of 2007, when father and son David and Andrew Whelan were metal-detecting in a field to the south of Harrogate, in north Yorkshire.

The hoard that they found was contained in a beautifully worked silver bowl, about the size of a small melon. Astonishingly, it contained more than 600 coins, all silver and roughly the same diameter as a modern £1 coin, but wafer thin. They are mostly from Anglo-Saxon territory, but there are also some Viking coins produced in York, as well as exotic imports from western Europe and central Asia. Along with the coins were one gold and five silver arm-rings. And then – the ingredient that makes it absolutely certain that this is not an Anglo-Saxon but a Viking hoard – there’s what archaeologists call hack silver, chopped-up fragments of brooches and rings and thin silver bars, mostly a couple of centimetres long, that the Vikings used as currency.

The hoard pitches us into a key moment in the history of England – when an Anglo-Saxon king, Athelstan, at last defeated the Viking invaders and built the beginnings of the kingdom of England. Above all, it shows us the range of contacts enjoyed by the Vikings while they were running northern England. These Scandinavians were extremely well connected, as the historian Michael Wood makes clear:

There’s a Viking arm-ring from Ireland, there are coins minted as far away as Samarkand and Afghanistan and Baghdad. This gives you a sense of the reach of the age; these Viking kings and their agents and their trade routes spread across western Europe, Ireland, Scandinavia. You read Arab accounts of Viking slave dealers on the banks of the Caspian Sea; Guli the Russian, so called because of his Russian hat but actually Irish, was dealing in slaves out there on the Caspian and those kinds of trade routes, the river routes down to the Black Sea through Novgorod and Kiev and those kinds of places. You can see how, in a very short time, coins minted in Samarkand in, say, 915 could end up in Yorkshire in the 920s.

Coins from the hoard: (top) dihram, (middle) coin with name of St Peter, (bottom) coin issued by Athelstan

The Vale of York hoard makes it clear that Viking England did indeed operate on a transcontinental scale. There is a dirham from Samarkand, and there are other Islamic coins from central Asia. Like York, Kiev was a great Viking city, and there merchants from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan traded their goods via Russia and the Baltic to the whole of northern Europe. In the process, the people around Kiev became very rich. An Arab merchant of the time describes them making neck-rings for their wives by melting down the gold and silver coins they’d amassed from trade:

Round her neck she wears gold or silver rings; when a man amasses 10,000 dirhams, he makes his wife one ring; when he has 20,000 he makes two … and often a woman has many of these rings.

And indeed there’s a fragment of one of these Russian