Scotland in Pagan Times; The Iron Age

by Joseph Anderson

With these personal ornaments of various kinds, which constituted the bulk of the hoard, there was a small quantity of bullion, and a few coins.

The bullion consisted of a number of ingots of silver, some entire, others cut, and a quantity of fragments of brooches and arm-rings chopped up into small pieces, as if with an axe or chisel. The largest ingot is 3¼ inches in length, and weighs 1089 grains.

The coins were few—at least few were recovered—although from their small size and thinness they were more liable to be overlooked in the hasty and promiscuous grubbing of many treasure-seekers. One is a St. Peter’s penny struck at York, of tenth century date. Another is a penny of King Æthelstan (A.D. 925), struck at Leicester. All the others are Asiatic, of the time when the seat of the Mohammedan Caliphate was at Cufa or Bagdad. Three of these Cufic coins belong to the Abbaside Caliphs, and seven to the Samanian dynasty. They range in their dates between A.D. 887 and 945, and the places of mintage, still legible, are Al-shash, Bagdad, and Samarcand.

Let us now group the characteristics of this deposit. It is a hoard buried in the earth, but with no indication of its having been in any way connected with the rites of sepulture. It is a large hoard, altogether amounting to 16 lbs. in weight. It is entirely of silver, and consists of personal ornaments, ingots, and coins. The ornaments are brooches, neck rings, and arm rings. The brooches are of penannular form, but differ in their character from those we have learned to recognise as distinctively Celtic. The neck rings and arm rings present no features of a specially Celtic character. The coins are Cufic and Anglo-Saxon, dated mostly in the end of the ninth and the first half of the tenth centuries.

No similar hoard has been discovered in any other part of Scotland. But in its general composition the Skaill hoard resembles a considerable number of other hoards of similar articles which have been found in other countries. They are most abundant in the eastern parts of Sweden, less common in Norway, and of occasional occurrence in Denmark. In none of these countries has there been found a hoard consisting of such a large number of personal ornaments as that found at Skaill, but the forms and the character of the ornaments found in these hoards of silver, associated with mintages of the ninth and tenth centuries, are always the same. The specialty of these hoards so found in Scandinavia is that they are largely composed of Cufic and Anglo-Saxon coins.[^[48]] The personal ornaments associated with them consist for the most part of large rings for the neck, formed of intertwisted rods and wires; arm rings of similar character, or of solid bars, circular or quadrangular in section, bent into a penannular oval, and ornamented with the peculiar triangular patterns impressed by a punch, with dots in the field. The brooches, with long pins and bulbous ends like thistle heads, are less common, but occur occasionally in such hoards in all the three Scandinavian countries. In many of the hoards there are also ingots, and dismembered ornaments cut and hammered into lumps of mere bullion. “This fact,” says Hildebrand, “shows that they had no value with the people who possessed them, except the intrinsic value of the metal.” Weighing scales and weights are sometimes also found with them, and close examination reveals the fact that the ornaments and portions of ornaments have been often tested with a cutting instrument to try their purity. This again reveals the trafficker rather than the plundering Viking, who carries off his spoil without any such careful examination; and, according to this view, Mr. Hildebrand concludes that the silver ornaments and the Cufic coins must be considered as equally foreign to Scandinavia. “There can be no doubt,” he says, “that these ornaments, ingots, and lumps of silver were brought with the coins from Asia, where silver is more easily obtained than in the northern parts of Europe.” With reference to this conclusion it may be remarked that while the derivation of the Cufic coins needs no demonstration, and while it may be admitted that other products of the Arab civilisation of the time were brought by the same stream of commerce through Russia to the Scandinavian countries, and thence to Scotland, England, and Ireland, it still remains to be shown that these silver ornaments are Oriental in their origin. This can only be demonstrated by showing that they are allied by their forms and ornament to the Oriental types of that period; or, if this cannot be done, it must at least be shown that they differ so widely in form and ornament from the types of the western lands in which they are found as to forbid the supposition that they may be of western origin.

We have no knowledge of the types of personal ornaments in use in Asia at the time indicated by the dates of mintage of these Cufic coins. It is impossible, therefore, to establish the Oriental origin of these silver ornaments by demonstrating their identity of type with Oriental ornaments of that period. The question which remains for discussion, therefore, is, whether their forms and ornament present such relations to the forms and the ornament of any of the western countries in which they are found, as will correlate them with known types of native origin.

In 1840 a large hoard of silver ornaments, weighing upwards of a thousand ounces, along with a quantity of silver coins, from six to seven thousand in number, was discovered concealed in a leaden chest, and buried in the soil at Cuerdale, near Preston, in Lancashire. The coins consisted chiefly of Anglo-Saxon pennies, with a few of French and some Cufic mints, and the inference from the data they afford is that the deposit was probably made at some time subsequent to the commencement of the tenth century. The personal ornaments in the hoard consisted chiefly of rings of various sizes and of similar character to those that have been described as occurring in the deposit at Skaill. Some of the larger rings were composed of interplaited rods and twisted wires like those from Skaill, and the solid rings were also ornamented with patterns produced by impressions of a triangular punch, with dots in the field. There were also some fragments of the peculiarly-shaped brooches, with bulbous knobs and prickly ornamentation. One object in the hoard was distinctively Scandinavian—a small Thor’s hammer of silver, such as were commonly worn as amulets in the heathen time. Among the fragments described at the time as incapable of being determined, there are four which may now be said with certainty to be portions of penannular brooches of the distinctively Celtic form. This Celtic relationship was not perceived by Mr. Hawkins (who described them), except in one instance, which he recognises as “so much resembling the patterns on early crosses and architectural remains, that it is difficult to assign to it any other than a Northern origin.” But his general conclusion is that “it is scarcely consistent with sound reasoning upon all the facts of the case to assign any but an Oriental origin to these objects.” In this he is supported by Mr. Worsaae, who says that as these silver ornaments are not found in the west of Europe except in association with Cufic coins, and do not occur at all in the interior or southern parts of Europe, he regards it as without doubt that Mr. Hawkins has been perfectly right in giving an Oriental origin to at least a great part of the silver ornaments found at Cuerdale.

Setting aside these conclusions, in so far as they are merely conjectural, it appears established that the area over which these deposits of silver ornaments are found is limited to the three Scandinavian countries and the British Isles. It is certain that among the ornaments so found some are distinctively Scandinavian, and others distinctively Celtic, while the remainder, which constitutes the bulk of the deposits, is of unknown derivation, but has been conjecturally assigned to an Oriental origin, on account of its association with the Cufic coins. I therefore proceed to the examination of these objects which are of undetermined origin, with the view of ascertaining the special characteristics and relations of their form and ornament.

I have already remarked that the form of these bulbous brooches is that which is distinctive of the Celtic brooch—penannular, with expanded ends. Its special peculiarities are exaggerations of the specialties of form by which the Celtic type is distinguished from all others; and in this respect the form assumed by these bulbous brooches, though Celtic in type, is so strongly differentiated from the purely Celtic form, that it may be regarded as a distinct variety. No other form of brooch is so huge and massive, with such a length of pin. The Celtic brooch-maker was so much more of an artist than the mere silversmith that he flattened the ring of the brooch and broadened its terminal expansions in order to provide space for the elaborate surface decoration in which he delighted. The maker of these bulbous brooches, on the other hand, is so much more of the silversmith than of the artist that the bulk of his work is merely finished with the hammer—the ring and the pin are beaten into form, and the expansions made globular instead of flat. The form of these brooches, therefore, agrees with the Celtic form in its main features, its penannular character, and its length of pin, loosely looped on the ring of the brooch.

But if the form of these brooches be thus closely allied to the Celtic form, their ornament is no less closely allied to the Celtic system of ornamentation. The peculiar prickliness of the bulbs, which is the most marked feature of their character, is not distinctively Celtic, but a suggestion of it is occasionally found on Celtic silver-work, as, for instance, on the almost globular head of a Celtic brooch in the National Museum, and on a gold brooch found near Coleraine.[^[49]] But the reverse hemispheres of the bulbous terminations of the Skaill brooches, which present this prickly ornamentation on the obverse, are also decorated with engraved designs. These are of two varieties, simple interlaced ribbon patterns and zoomorphic patterns. The character of the interlaced work so closely resembles the Celtic style that it may be said to be more Celtic than Scandinavian. The character of the zoomorphic work, on the other hand, is more Scandinavian than Celtic, and is suggestive of the style and treatment of the designs on the Manx crosses, while it more closely resembles some of the more characteristic designs of the purely Scandinavian metal-work of the heathen time.