Cuerdale Hoard, Viking silver hoard in Lancashire, England.
The Cuerdale Hoard is a collection of over 8,600 silver objects including coins, jewelry, and ingots weighing around 40 kilograms in total. Today the pieces are scattered across three locations: most are at the British Museum, while other portions are displayed at the Ashmolean Museum and the Château-musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Workers discovered the collection in 1840 while repairing the embankment of the River Ribble. The coins within suggest it was buried between 903 and 910, possibly by Vikings who had been expelled from Dublin just years before.
The silver coins come from different regions and show how far trade routes stretched in the early medieval world. You can see coins from Viking kingdoms, Anglo-Saxon territories, and from Byzantine and Islamic lands, revealing the economic connections of the time.
Most objects are displayed far apart from each other, so plan which museums you want to visit depending on your location. If you want to see everything, you'll need to choose between visiting sites in England and France.
Some of the coins were so newly minted that archaeologists could pinpoint the exact period of burial. This makes the find a rare time capsule showing how Vikings lived during this turbulent era of the early Middle Ages.
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