Professional Documents
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VIKING AGE
YORK
AND
THE NORTH
Edited by
R A Hall
1978
Michael Dolley
Fig 8
reflect a brief acceptance by the Danes of York of a nephew
of lfred the Great, thelwald by name, who took refuge
with the Vikings after an unsuccessful attempt to dispute
the succession of his cousin Edward the Elder in 899.
What is indisputable, however, is that the SIEFREDUS
REX and CNUT REX coins and their regally anonymous
analogues constitute the first coins of the York Vikings, and
that the earliest of them were not struck for at least
two decades after the 876 plantation of Yorkshire by all
but the most militant of that wing of the Great Army which
had followed Halfdan into Northumbria the previous year.
Exceptionally rare coins which essay the name Halfdan are
now recognized as belonging to the Danish Midlands and
to the 890s, and have nothing at all to do with the Halfdan
killed on Strangford Lough in 877.
Fig 6
interpretation is King Cnut, and there seems much to be
said for Dr A P Smyths suggestion that we identify him
with the Danish incomer Knutr who c 900 fought battles
north of Cleveland and near Scarborough, and who was
killed at Dublin in 903 (?). Certainly an Irish nexus accords
well with the circumstance that all but a handful of his
extant coins derive from the great Cuerdale treasure
recovered from the banks of the Ribble above Preston in
1840. Mr James Graham-Campbell rightly insists on the
Irish flavour of the hacksilver and ingots accompanying
the coins, and the most plausible interpretation of the
treasure is that it had been brought there by Norse refugees
from Dublin when the Irish of Meath temporarily expelled
the Scandinavian inhabitants. To judge from the site they
appear to have been attempting to force a crossing rather
than push up the valley, but their ultimate objective must
have been York, home for the Danish survivors of Knutrs
abortive intervention in Ireland and a possible place of
refuge for their Norse cousins and quondam allies.
Fig 9
afftnities between the York coins and certain Viking pieces
struck at Quentovic near the modern Calais. It is a coinage
of sea-kings that concerns us, and sea-kings of the North
Sea, for all their occasional forays into the waters off
Ireland and western Scotland.
Fig 7
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Fig 12
Fig 13
Fig 10
Fig 11
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Fig 14
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Fig 1.5
English, and the reverse indistinguishable except by its
legend from a common obverse and reverse of thelstan.
Such pieces had little trouble in circulating beside English
coins, and the odd specimen has occurred in a whole range
of finds from Scotland and Ireland. A curious detail is that
there is only one moneyer, and it would seem that the
Hiberno-Norse king had taken over lock, stock, and barrel
the minting arrangements of his predecessor.
In 941 Anlaf Guthfrithsson switched his theatre of
operations to the territories north of the Tees which a
quarter of a century earlier had first attracted his kinsman
(uncle?) Ragnall. Again he was victorious, but within a
matter of weeks he died, and most of his conquests were
lost by his inadequate successors. First to arrive on the scene
was his cousin Anlaf Sihtricsson nicknamed Cuaran (of
the sandal) who was unable to prevent Eadmund of England
bringing the frontier back to the Humber by dint of a
campaign which English propaganda was able to represent
as a liberation where the Danish population of the East
Midlands was concerned. To judge from the coins he was
joined by a certain Sihtric, a brother perhaps, who may
be the Sihtric of the Jewels whom later tradition associated
with a humiliation of Dublin at the hands of Muirchertach
(Moriarty) nicknamed of the leather cloaks, and quite
possibly the Sihtric killed a year or two later during one
of the last Viking descents upon France. It was doubtless
their failure to hold onto the conquests of 940 that prompted
the intervention of the dead Anlaf's brother, another
Ragnall who is better known to the numismatist as Regnald
from the spelling of his name invariably employed upon
the coins. Of Sihtric just two coins have survived. One,
found in Rome, is of purely English type, and but for the
legends would pass as English. The other, probably
found in Ireland, is of very English fabric but has for its
Fig 16
coins were struck by an authority other than English, and it
was perhaps because the criterion was so immediately
obvious that the alien style was abandoned. With the
next issue there was still no reversion to REX, after which
two generations would elapse before CUNUNC was
ephemerally revived on rare coins of Dublin by Sihtric
nicknamed Silkbeard, a grandson (?) of Anlaf and greatnephew (?) of Regnald.
To the numismatist the York coins of 943 and 944 exhibit
remarkable diversity, but superficially they correspond
too closely to English prototypes to be exciting to a
non-specialist. Shared by Anlaf and Regnald is a
modification of a common type of thelstan where the
cross patte of the obverse is replaced by a cross moline
Fig 17
(Fig 17). Corroboration of their York origin comes from
a lead trial-piece (or mint-weight?) now in the British
Museum but apparently found in York which bears the
imprint of two reverse dies with the names of different
moneyers. Struck for Anlaf by York moneyers are even
rarer pennies with a reverse type of a flower modelled on
coins of Derbyindeed it is only recently that Mr C E
Blunt has argued that they are not Derby coins of the cousin.
They are followed by relatively common coins again
reading REX which imitate the standard English penny of
the period. The obverse type is a small cross patte, while
the reverse has the name of the moneyer in two lines with
Fig 18
crosses between and a trefoil above and below (Fig 18).
On the earlier pieces the kings name is still spelt ANLAF
but on the later it is ONLAF or OLOF.
5
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Fig 19
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Note
The text of the foregoing will be found essentially to
conform to that of M Dolley, Viking Coins of the Danelaw
and of Dublin (London 1965), with the occasional
alteration of attribution and of emphasis to take account
of-research, not all of it as yet published, during the
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R A Hall