Legends of treasure buried near a riverbank turned out to be more than just myth.
BY ELIZABETH RAYNE
Local legend said that anyone standing on the south bank of the River Ribble and looking upriver would be gazing at the site where the richest treasure in England lay buried. One evening in May of 1840, workmen who’d spent long hours repairing an eroded embankment at Cuerdale heard a spade strike something solid. Digging further into the sandy soil, they uncovered a rotted wooden chest, its lead lining crumbling and caked in earth. When they pried it open, they discovered that some legends might be worth believing.
The workers had accidentally unearthed an ancient and astonishingly large cache of silver. The ingots alone would later be found to weigh 68 pounds (about 31 kg), and 7,000 coins overflowed from the remains of the box, along with armfuls of scrapped silver that had once taken the form of jewelry and ornaments before being traded. Other people had tried to find this treasure before—fortune tellers had wandered through nearby meadows clutching silver chains and charms to guide them, and one farmer in the area was said to have plowed his fields twice in a search effort that turned up empty. But now, the hoard had finally been revealed.
Vikings had buried what is now known as the Cuerdale Hoard in the Ribble Valley sometime between 905 and 910 C.E. Much of England used to be under Viking rule—taking advantage of the weakening Anglo-Saxons, they took over a swath of England known as the Danelaw, and most of the items in the hoard have been identified as Anglo-Viking. Numismatists studied the coins to determine their origin, and while the majority were minted in England (both in Anglo-Saxon and Danelaw regions, with 3,000 silver pennies immortalizing the Viking king Cnut the Great), others came from distant lands. There were about a thousand Frankish coins, 50 dirhams from across the Arab world, some from early Scandinavia, a few from Eastern Europe, and one going back to the Byzantine empire. It’s possible these were the spoils of earlier Viking plundering.
Vikings who went on raids in continental Europe often came back with armfuls of riches. Some of the coins had come from the short-lived Middle Francia, which sprawled from the Netherlands to Northern Italy, and dates suggest they were acquired on at least two different campaigns. Raids on West Francia probably explain the rest of the Frankish coins. Even the Anglo-Viking and Anglo-Saxon coins had not all been manufactured at the same time or come from the same place, and while this was further evidence of raiding, it was also a reflection of trade. As for the rest of the hoard, the silver ingots were found to have come from Ireland, which is consistent with Vikings being driven out of Ireland just before the glittering hoard was put in the ground. Fragments of jewelry and other items that had been dismembered into hack silver had been used as currency.
Why the Cuerdale Hoard was buried to begin with is something of a mystery. It’s thought that Viking hoards were often hidden and abandoned because whoever had been carrying them was fleeing something—if they had not already been captured or felled in battle, that is. This may have been the case with defeated Irish Vikings crossing over to England, though there are alternate explanations.
Some Viking leaders secreted hoards away temporarily—because highly regarded leaders were expected to share such wealth, they would often bury treasures for safekeeping until they could distribute the riches among their people. Others, like Egil Skallagrímsson, would hide their treasure as a flagrant display of wealth. There was also the belief that anyone who buried treasure while alive would find it waiting in the afterworld of Valhalla.
Upon its discovery, who the hoard actually belonged to became a heated debate.
Each workman kept a coin, but most of it would end up in the hands of Queen
Victoria, as mandated by the treasure trove law of the time. After the death of Queen Victoria, the Cuerdale Hoard passed to the British Museum, with 60 objects later moved to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Included in the extraordinary collection of the British Museum are most of the coins and ingots, hack silver, and pieces that were intended to be hack silver but somehow stayed intact. These include arm rings, some intricately engraved, finger and neck rings, a buckle, brooches, and a strap end.
This article was originally published in Popular Mechanics.
