Silver, scales, and chopped-up treasure: how the Vikings paid for things

We called our free prequel The Silver Goblet, and silver keeps turning up in these stories for a reason. In the Viking age it wasn’t just something pretty to put on a shelf. It was money, in the most literal sense you can imagine. And the way the Vikings handled it is stranger, and a good deal cleverer, than you might think.

Money by weight, not by number

For much of the period the Vikings ran what historians call a bullion economy. Silver was valued by its weight, full stop. A coin was worth the silver in it, no more and no less, and whose face happened to be stamped on the front barely mattered. You weren’t paying with a coin. You were paying with a small lump of precious metal that happened to be coin-shaped.

Hacksilver: just cut off what you need

This leads to one of my favourite details of the whole age. If a payment came to less than a whole coin, or an arm-ring, or an ingot, you simply cut off a piece. Archaeologists keep digging up hoards full of what’s called hacksilver: chopped fragments of coins, snipped-off bits of arm-rings, broken brooches, all jumbled together in a pouch or a buried pot.

Your wealth was portable, and it was endlessly divisible. Owe someone half the value of a ring? Cut the ring in half. It is a wonderfully practical way to run an economy, if you don’t mind carrying a knife and doing a little arithmetic at the market.

The merchant’s toolkit

Because everything came down to weight, a trader carried the tools to measure it: a small folding balance and a neat set of weights. These turn up again and again in graves and trading sites across the Viking world, a whole pocket-sized business kit.

They also didn’t take anyone’s silver on trust. Coins from Viking-age hoards are often covered in tiny nicks and bends, so-called peck-marks, where someone pressed in a knife point to check that the silver went all the way through and wasn’t a cheaper metal with a thin silver coat. A Viking, it seems, trusted no one’s coin at face value. Fair enough.

Coins from the other side of the world

Here’s the part that still amazes me. Dig up a silver hoard in Sweden or Norway and a good share of the coins may be Arabic dirhams, struck thousands of miles away in the cities of the Islamic world. They travelled north along the great river routes through the east, traded for furs, amber, and slaves, and ended up buried under a farmyard in Scandinavia. The island of Gotland alone has given up hoards holding thousands of them.

Picture it: a farmer in the cold north, paying for a sheep with silver minted in Samarkand or Baghdad. That’s the reach of the Viking age in a single image, and it’s all true.

Wealth you could wear

It’s worth adding that an arm-ring wasn’t only jewellery. It was savings you wore on your body, easy to show off and, when the time came, easy to chop a piece off. A man’s wealth walked around with him, on his arms, which tells you something about how much they trusted banks.

Back to the goblet

So when a character like Ulv gets his hands on something like a silver goblet, it isn’t just loot to admire. It’s wealth he can weigh, cut, and spend, right down to the last fragment. Once you know that, the treasure in these stories starts to feel less like decoration and more like a purse waiting to be opened.

If you’d like to see where it all begins, The Silver Goblet is a free Viking Ventures prequel, and Ulv’s story proper opens in Viking.