Sigtuna must have come from abroad of which foreign coins formed a substantial part.
In a weight economy the silver being coined or scrap should, in principle, not make any
difference. The extensive issues of Scandinavian imitations of Anglo-Saxon pennies
c. 995 – 1020 cannot, however, be regarded as merely experimental coinages of crude
nature. Involvement of skilled moneyers and the use of dies from official English coinage
also suggest monetary operations on a grander scale. The evidence for either a weight or
money economy is hard to interpret in the Viking Age, but the scale of locally made
imitations of Anglo-Saxon coins suggests that coins were used with a premium, a
concept that must have been familiar to Vikings in contact with foreign lands and
merchants, a practice that became the rule rather than the exception with the intro-
duction of state coinages.
MONETISATION OF THE MARKETPLACERecent excavations undertaken in early urban Viking societies such as Ribe, Birka,
Hedeby, Tissø, Uppåkra and Kaupang make strong cases for the use of coins in a
marketplace context. The number of single finds from these seasonal productive sites
and urban settlements have increased manifold during the last decades. At Kaupang
some twenty coins were found during excavations in the 1950 s and 1960 s, while the
total has reached nearly 100 after using metal detectors for investigations in the 1990 s
and 2000 s.
The transition phase from market towns to towns took place at the same time as the
monetary import shifted from east to west in the second half of the tenth century. There
is no reason to think these processes were sparked off in either way, but it is interesting
to note that while the coins used in the market towns all over the Viking world were of
Islamic origin, the coins used in the newly established towns in the eleventh century
were of Christian origin.
Monetary influences in marketplaces became visible through local coin production
in Haithabu and Ribe already from c. 825. Coin production is not conclusive evidence
for the widespread use of coins in Viking Age society; however, it does provide an
understanding of how important coinage and money were, more so with the emergence
of state organisations in the eleventh century. Whatever perspective one takes on
numismatics, coinage and monetary history, the Viking Age represents a bridge
between Iron Age and medieval Scandinavia, and a decisive period in the history of
coinage and monetary development.
BIBLIOGRAPHYBlackburn, M. ( 1981 ) ‘A Scandinavian crux/intermediate small cross die-chain reappraised’,
in M. Blackburn and D.M. Metcalf (eds) Viking-Age Coinage in the Northern Lands (The
Sixth Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History; British Archaeological Reports
International Series 122 ), Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.
——( 1985 ) ‘English dies used in the Scandinavian imitative coinages’, Hikuin, 11 : 101 – 24.
Gillingham, J. ( 1989 ) ‘The most precious jewel in the English Crown: levels of Danegeld and
Heregeld in the early eleventh century’, English Historical Review, 104 : 373 – 84.
——( 1990 ) ‘Chronicles and coins as evidence for levels of tribute and taxation in late tenth and
early eleventh-century England’, English Historical Review, 105 : 939 – 50.
–– chapter 10 : Coinage and monetary economies––