Most of the pieces were items of silver jewellery that had been broken up, either for use as hacksilver or for payment in bullion. Much of it was of Norse Irish origin — i. A Carolingian buckle and some brooch fragments showed evidence of contact with France and there was also a Pictish silver sheet and fragment of a silver comb.
That much of the hacksilver, or bullion, is of Irish Norse gives weight to this argument, as does the presence of newly minted coins made by York Vikings. Another theory is that the hoard represents the wealth of a local chief, buried for safekeeping, a Viking-style safety deposit box, to be dipped into as and when needed. To accept cookies from this site, please click the Allow Cookies button below. Allow Cookies. Qty: Add to Cart -OR-. Details The catalogue focuses on the entire non-numismatic contents of the Cuerdale hoard discovered in , together with all the other hoards and single-finds of gold and silver artefacts ornaments and ingots of Viking character in the British Museum, found in Britain and Ireland, up to the end of the year , with each piece individually catalogued and illustrated.
Some of which had been reduced to ingots of varying shapes and weights; much of the rest consists of silver jewellery, and other artefacts that had been broken up into small pieces intended to be melted.
Even by modern standards, it represents astounding wealth, which has led to theories that it was perhaps a huge war chest collected by the recently expelled Vikings from Dublin intent on making a forceful return. Curiously, a long-held local Preston-Lancashire legend, which predates the discovery of the hoard stated that anyone who stood on the south bank of the River Ribble at Walton-le-Dale and looked upriver to Ribchester would be within sight of the richest treasure in England.
The hoard was declared a treasure trove and handed to the Duchy of Lancaster, owned by the crown. It was given by the Duchy to the British Museum, where most of it remains. In addition to enjoying quiet scrutiny of these artifacts in such a friendly and precisely informative format, the non-specialist reader will want to know what Graham-Campbell and his team make of the significance of the hoard for a deeper understanding of the remarkable Viking diaspora into the North Atlantic islands during the ninth and tenth centuries, what it can tell us about the nature of their contact with the various groups living there--hostile, friendly, and commercial--and what changes were wrought upon the societies of natives and newcomers in the process of creating new ones.
For this information, some readers may be disappointed. As appropriate to a museum catalogue, this collective effort is heavy on detailed description and light on analysis. Graham-Campbell deliberately avoids personal speculation as to the precise circumstances of the hoard's burial, intending "to make available the essential data in sufficient detail as to allow all those interested in the study of this material to be able to utilize it for their own research purposes--and thus to arrive at new interpretations and conclusions for the general advancement of Viking studies" This modest and discreet goal is mercifully honored in the breach, however, since Graham-Campbell is quite willing to cite with apparent approval the informed impressions of others, including one of his co-authors, the numismatist Gareth Williams, so that readers do have a little more help after all in grasping the importance of the hoard and the unanswered questions surrounding it.
The Ribble estuary provided access by water between the Scandinavian trading emporium at Dublin west across the Irish Sea and the primary land route east across the Pennines to the Viking kings at York with whom the Dublin Norse were closely associated. The hoard was found above the point of navigation, only a mile or two east of where the old Roman north-south road crossed the Ribble and on the direct route overland to York.
Yet the Dublin Norse had been driven out of Ireland in , only a few years before the treasure was deposited, so that it may have been secreted by Scandinavian exiles from that country, perhaps in the fruitless hope of using it to help finance a return expedition. A stash of such magnitude seems hardly to suggest an "accidental loss" , as with so many of the single finds.
In addition, the deposit lacks any obvious religious or ritual aspects, which would have suggested that it was an offering to the gods or an effort to secure a wealthy afterlife for the depositor according to "Odin's so-called law" , as later described by Snorri Sturluson in his thirteenth-century Ynglinga Saga Chapter 8.
But in this case, it is likely that the treasure was simply deposited for safe keeping in the "bank," either as a temporary expedient in emergency circumstances or more deliberately for later withdrawal when needed at some point in the future.
In the event, the hoard was never recovered, suggesting that its owner had passed on before communicating its whereabouts to heirs.
0コメント