Silver, Butter, Cloth ― Monetary and Social Economies in the Viking Age

Silver, Butter, Cloth advances current debates about the nature and complexity of Viking economic systems. It explores how silver and other commodities were used in monetary and social economies across the Scandinavian world of the Viking Age (c. 800-1100 AD) before and alongside the wide scale introduction of coinage. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach that unites archaeological, numismatic, and metallurgical analyses, Kershaw and Williams examine the uses and sources of silver in both monetary and social transactions, addressing topics such as silver fragmentation, hoarding, and coin production and re-use. Uniquely, it also goes beyond silver, giving the first detailed consideration of the monetary role of butter, cloth, and gold in the Viking economy. Indeed, it is instrumental in developing methodologies to identify such commodity monies in the archaeological record.

The use of silver and other commodities within Viking economies is a dynamic field of study, fuelled by important recent discoveries across the Viking world. The 14 contributions to this book, by a truly international group of scholars, draw on newly available archaeological data from eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the North Atlantic, and the British Isles and Ireland, to present the latest original research. Together, they deepen understanding of Viking monetary and social economies and advance new definitions of 'economy', 'currency', and 'value' in the ninth to eleventh centuries.

Jane Kershaw is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford. She was formerly a British Academy post-doctoral research fellow at UCL. Her research focuses on Viking-Age material culture from Britain and Scandinavia. Her first book, Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England was published by OUP in 2013.


Gareth Williams has been a curator at the British Museum since 1996, with responsibility for British and European coinage, about AD 500 to about 1180. Within this area he specialises in Anglo-Saxon and Viking coinage. Much of his work focuses on the use of coinage as evidence within broader historical and archaeological studies.