Viking Trade & Commerce

hi I am Sven Sigurdsson I'm a member of serve alder Vikings and today I'm here to talk to you about Viking trade and commerce there are numerous hordes and finds in Scandinavia and mainland Europe consisting of silver items thousands upon thousands of coins thousands of bracelets and bangles rings ingots foreign and domestic to the Vikings in Scandinavia we can start with coins what we have here are several different examples coins that have been found in Viking Age hoards each of them is paired meaning it as just the opposing side of the coin these two up here are from head to be which is nowadays in Germany but the Viking Age was a large Danish trading settlement near the coast the Danes tried to from what we can tell establish their own coinage system in their locality and headed II but it did not end up taking off but we did we do have quite a few finds of these specific style of coins these two are two different types of Arabic des REM which have been found in Viking hoards the Durham was a very widely circulated currency and a very widely recognized one both of them have Islamic script on it these are the Umayyad Caliphate and these are the opposite caliphate two different caliphates that operated in the Middle East during the Viking Age these are Byzantine coins and this gets very complex because they had very many coins and they changed it constantly specifically with each new emperor of which they had many these two coins are examples of English pennies this is the Eric of the blood axe penny and this is the citric penny [Music] so what you just saw was one way of striking a coin sources and finds are scarce regarding how the Vikings actually did it but there are only so many ways it could have been done in the Middle Ages there are tapestries that were made showing how coin Minter's perform the task and often enough you have large blocks that they sat on with a smaller anvil in place and it looks as if they take it and they're tapping it rhythmically the way that this is set up the coins would be misprinted if I were to do that so doing one solid strike is able to yield the results that we need there are many different types of coins that have been found in these hoards most of them are foreign and the funny thing about them is is that they have no value as far as what they were worth in the country of their origin the Vikings they were only worth their weight in silver so you would end up finding coins cut up into halves and into quarters and you might even find smaller slivers and fragments ingots and bracelets cut up into pieces all to satisfy a weight when making trade so as a Viking as a traitor he would go to a market or some place to conduct business and you would have to do your research to find out the market value of certain things and you could be trading as well and beads Vikings were very very fond of beads and amber but back to the coins what would happen is let's say you wanted to buy a certain number of Glass Beach and I would give you your price so you would either present me with your items or you would present me with your silver so if you wanted to purchase a certain number of beads or amber chips for example I would give you the number and you would present your silver and it could be in the form of ingots it could be in the form of a bracelet or you could have a miscellany of coins so we would end up cutting them up one of the things that somebody would encounter in a situation like this is how to tell the trustworthiness of a merchants weights so what you could do is you could take a very well-known point such as the Durham the Durham comes from the Arabic caliphates and it was at the time one of if not the longest standing currency in the world so it had a very uniform weight and styled as could be hoped for in that time period considering they were all made by hand and not machined as we would do today so you could take one and I know that mine my small weights way as much as one and a quarter of a Durant it's very very close important to remember that the people who make these replicas are doing it off of a distant number and a hard-to-find number so the fact that he was able to get these as close as he did to the correct weight is phenomenal so we could test it further by adding a second small weight and adding another one and a quarter of a dress again very very close so back in the Viking Age that would be one way to determine whether a merchants weights were valid another problem that you would run into was the purity of silver because some people would try to counterfeit coins and ingots and fill it with impurities such as lead or pewter and what that would do is increase its weight but diminish its value so it was not uncommon to find points with prick marks in it because you could tell by a darkened color whether or not it was silver if it was silver Oh be bright shining like silver if not you might see darkened metal inside these are the two bangles that I have that are based off of fines from the Orkney Islands which were held by the north's during the Viking Age this one is a replica of a bracelet found on the Gotland the Vikings would call them ring money so they would wear them as decorative pieces but it was called ring money for the office you can take it and you can take your knife and cut pieces off of it to do the same and satisfy a trade so an oft often times you'll end up finding a broken or twisted pieces of pack silver such as this and hack silver is another common thing that was found in hoards and it is literally miscellaneous pieces of silver items coins and gets cut up into pieces it's still worthwhile but you would often break it up to make it a little easier for transport ingots you'd often find these you notice that they have this bumpy texture surface to it and what that means is that you would often you could take a bigger make a depression in the sand find a dish or something to hold over the fire to melt down your silver which has a fairly low melting point and then you can point pour it into the depression that you've made once it's cooled take it out and dust the sand off and you have an ingot so if you have too much hack silver too many small pieces that is one way to condense it into an easier to carry package the science of history and living history and reenactment as it is is constantly based on new discoveries which we are having every year it doesn't happen very fast sometimes but occasionally you have a spree of new findings and discoveries and things that kind of check what we think to be correct and so you have to figure it out and money is a difficult one so this is what how we understand a Viking economy to have worked roughly obviously there are a lot of points that I didn't go over it's a difficult subject to learn and we're learning more every day I hope that this information gives you I guess a clearer idea of what the Vikings were like kind of helps dispel further the misconception that they were barbaric and on culture because in the time period and the day they were very civilized very cultured and had very complex systems for how to do things I look forward to seeing you all at one of our events or even at one of yours to talk about this further we love questions and we can't wait to hear them from you

Channel: Sjorvaldar Vikings

Views: 1,656

Keywords:

Id: 1rhqo_Oaftk

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020