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Although Kiev and York were both Viking cities, contact between them would only very rarely have been direct. Normally, the trade route would have been constructed through a series of relays, with spices and silver coins and jewellery moving north, as amber and fur moved in the other direction, and at every stage there would have been a profit. But this trade route also carried the dark side of the Vikings’ reputation. All through eastern Europe, Vikings captured people to sell as slaves in the great market of Kiev – which explains why in so many European languages the words for ‘slave’ and ‘Slav’ are still closely connected.

This hoard also tells us a great deal of what was happening back in York. There, the Vikings were becoming Christian; but, as so often, the new converts were reluctant to abandon the symbols of their old religion. The Norse gods were not entirely dead. And so, on one coin minted at York around 920, we find the sword and name of the Christian St Peter but, intriguingly, the ‘i’ of Petri – Peter – is in the shape of a hammer, the emblem of the old Norse god, Thor. The new faith uses the weapons of the old.

We can be pretty certain that this treasure was buried soon after 927. That was the year Athelstan, king of Wessex, finally defeated the Vikings, conquered York and received the homage of rulers from Scotland and Wales. It was the biggest political event in Britain since the departure of the Romans, and the hoard contains one of the silver coins that Athelstan issued to celebrate it. On it he gives himself a new title, never used before by any ruler: Athelstan Rex totius Britanniae: Athelstan, King of All Britain. The modern idea of a united Britain starts here, although it was 800 years before it became a reality. But there is a sense in which Athelstan is the maker of England. Michael Wood explains:

The wonderful thing about the treasure is that it homes in on the very moment that England was created as a kingdom and as a state. The early tenth century is the moment when these ‘national identities’ start to be used for the first time, and that’s why all the later kings of the English, whether Normans or Plantagenets or Tudors, looked back to Athelstan as the founder of their kingdom. In one sense you could say they go back to that moment in 927.

Yet it was a pretty messy moment, and the hoard demonstrates that the struggle between Viking and Anglo-Saxon wasn’t yet over. The treasure must have belonged to a rich and powerful Viking who stayed on in Yorkshire under the new Anglo-Saxon regime, because some of the coins in his hoard were minted by Athelstan in York in 927. Something must then have gone wrong for our Viking, which led him to bury the hoard – but he did it so carefully that he must have intended to return. Was he killed in the ongoing skirmish between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons? Did he go back to Scandinavia, or on to Ireland? Whatever happened to the treasure-owner, most of the Vikings in England stayed on and, in due course, were assimilated. In north-east England today places with names ending in ‘by’ and ‘thorpe’ – like Grimsby and Cleethorpes – are living survivals of the long Viking presence. The Vale of York hoard reminds us that these places were also at one end of the huge trade route that, around 900, stretched from Scunthorpe to Samarkand.

57

Hedwig Beaker

Glass, probably made in Syria

1100–1200 AD

For many people, the name Hedwig, if it means anything at all, conjures up the obliging owl that delivers messages to Harry Potter. But if you come from central Europe, and especially if you come from Poland, Hedwig means something quite different: she’s a royal saint who, around 1200, became a national and religious symbol and who through the centuries has delivered not messages but miracles. The most famous of all Hedwig’s miracles was that the water in her glass turned regularly into wine, and across central Europe there is to this day a small, puzzling group of distinctive glass beakers alleged to be the very glasses from which she drank