How do you pay when there is no money of your own? The Vikings had a simple answer: with silver, weighed on the scales. Whole arm-rings, foreign coins and pieces of jewellery were chopped up as needed, until the weight was right. This “hacksilver” is one of the finest keys to understanding the Viking-age economy – and a world in which value was not printed but weighed.
In much of the Viking world it was not the face value of a coin that counted, but the pure weight of the silver. One speaks of a bullion economy. Whoever bought something laid silver on one pan of the scales until it balanced the weights on the other. It made no difference whether the silver came from a coin, a broken arm-ring or an ingot – what mattered was that the weight and the purity were right.
An arm-ring chopped into pieces, a foreign coin, an ingot – laid on the scales until the weight was right: that is how people paid in the North. Description of the Viking-age bullion economy
A large part of this silver came from far away. Along the great rivers of Eastern Europe, Arab silver flowed into the North – millions of dirhams, minted in the realm of the caliphs, reached the Baltic through trade with the east. For the Vikings these coins were not “money” in today's sense, but simply silver in a practical, portable form. At the great trading places such as Birka they changed hands by the thousand.
Whoever accepted silver wanted to be sure it was genuine. That is why countless pieces of silver bear small nicks and cuts – test marks with which one checked whether real silver lay beneath the surface, and not, say, silver-plated copper. Each of these nicks is a tiny testimony to distrust and care at once: in a world without a state guarantee of coinage, everyone had to become their own assayer.
So in the North the line between jewellery and money blurs. A silver arm or neck ring was at once adornment and a fortune worn on the body. If one needed part of it to pay, one chopped off a piece. Whoever wants to know more about the great silver treasures will find them in our piece on the silver hoards; and how silver finally became coins of its own is shown in the piece on Ribe's coins.
The idea of carrying precious material on the body is ancient. A ring, a beautiful piece that is at once value and adornment – this thought connected the Vikings with us. Today, too, people like to wear something real and beautiful at the wrist: no longer as a means of payment, but as a small, visible sign.
In much of the Viking world a bullion economy prevailed: silver was traded by weight, regardless of form. “Hacksilver” (chopped-up rings, ingots and coins) and Arab dirhams are attested in vast quantities in hoards and at trading places (e.g. Birka); folding scales and weights are part of the typical equipment. Test nicks on pieces of silver served to check authenticity. Only gradually did coinage of one's own prevail (see Ribe).
“The Vikings knew no money” is too crude: they knew value and payment very well – only they measured it by the weight of the silver, not by a stamped face value. Nor was the same system in use everywhere; in some places coins were indeed treated as coins. What is certain is the core: silver by weight, tested with nicks, worn as a ring – an economy you could hold in your hand.
Carnelian – the Vikings' red beads · Viking jewellery · Ribe & the North's first coins · The Vindelev gold hoard · The Skuldelev ships.