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Description: | Potential find of Treasure: a Viking silver ingot, Norfolk
Surface metal analysis conducted at the British Museum indicated an approximate silver content for the ingot of 99%; it weighs 62.38 grams.
The ingot is of broad slug-like shape, of plano-convex section with a slight lip around the edges of the convex face; length, 49 mm. The convex face has been partly flattened by transverse hammering with a rounded rectangular-sectioned tool giving it a corrugated appearance. Some of the indentations overlap. The long sides and narrower end are vertically ribbed by similar hammering. The ingot would have been cast in an open mould that may have been carved in stone, or possibly scraped in the earth.
A large number of silver ingots of the Viking period have been found mainly in hoards in England, Ireland and the Netherlands, as well as in Scandinavia. The transverse hammering is a feature that occurs only occasionally on silver and gold ingots in England and can be paralleled in the Cuerdale, Lancashire, hoard deposited around AD 905 (see the discussion of hammering of the gold ingot from Norwich: Treasure Annual Report 2000, no. 66). Silver ingots in general were probably used as bullion in payments or trade transactions. Those from the Southern Danelaw most likely date from the late 9th and early 10th century before the 920s, when a dual economy in which both coins and bullion were used came to an end (M Blackburn, ?Expansion and control: aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian minting south of the Humber?, Vikings and the Danelaw. Select papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, eds. J Graham-Campbell et al. (Oxford, 2001), pp. 125-42)
Note: See Treasure Annual Reports 1998-1999, no. 83; 2000, nos. 67-8; 2001, nos. 66-8.
The ingot would therefore qualify as Treasure under two of the stipulated criteria of the Treasure Act: it is more than 300 years old and the precious metal content exceeds 10%.
B.M. Ager
Curator
Department of Prehistory & Europe
17 November 2005 | Format: | text/html | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ | Publisher: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Rights holder: | The Portable Antiquities Scheme | Subjects: | archaeology | Temporal: | 850
920 | Source: | Portable Antiquities | Identifier: | http://www.finds.org.uk/database/artefac... | Language: | en-GB | Format: | text/html | Go to resource |
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