Cuerdale Hoard (original) (raw)

The Cuerdale Hoard, as it is known, was found on the 15th May 1840 by workmen at Hall Farm, Cuerdale, a total of 1,000 ozs of silver ingots and 7,000 Anglo-Saxon coins. Deposited 903-905AD.

The local tradition was clear and insistent. Anyone who stood on the south bank of the River Ribble at Walton le Dale, and looked up river towards Ribchester, would be within sight of the richest treasure in England. Nobody knew how the tradition had originated or how old it was. Nobody knew what the treasure might consist of, or precisely where it might lie. The skeptics naturally scoffed, especially when diviners paced the riverside meadows, hazel twigs, willow branches and silver chains limp in their hands. One day in 1810, it was recorded, a farmer deep ploughed his furrows twice in the hope of turning up a buried treasure. His reward was no more than a weightier crop that autumn. So much for local tradition. But one evening in May of 1840 the long-standing fiction was found to be fact.

It was a wet spring in the north-west and the meadows along the Ribble were sodden with rain. On 15th May a group of workmen were trudging home through the fields of Hall Farm, at Cuerdale, on the outskirts of Preston.

At one point they came upon a large, water-logged mass of soil that had slipped down towards the river, leaving an open rift in the earth some twenty yards above the water. In the rift lay the remnants of a wooden chest, inside which there was a disintegrating leaden box. When the soil and fragments of wood and lead had been cleared away, there remained a treasure comprising about a thousand ounces of silver in broken pieces and ingots, and over seven thousand silver coins.

Ever since the day of its discovery the Cuerdale hoard has puzzled numismatists. Even the dating of it proved difficult, particularly as many of the coins were unknown or exceedingly rare. Undoubtedly the most puzzling were some 3,000 silver pennies minted for a king named on them as Cnut. On the reverse many bear the word Cunnetti, apparently the name of the town where the coins were minted but which cannot be identified. Some numismatists think that it may have been Chester-le-Street, in County Durham. Others have suggested Cuneet, a village in Shropshire mentioned in the Domesday Book, or Cunetio, now Marlborough, in Wiltshire. Even the port of Quentovic, at the mouth of the River Canche, in Northern France, has been suggested as some of the Cuerdale coins bear that name in various forms and the port was often in Viking hands.

Another suggestion is that Cunnetti may have meant 'Cnut's people', and that the inscription 'Cnut, King of Cnut Rex Cunnetti' simply means 'Cnut, King of Cnut's people'. Yet another ingenious suggestion is that the name Cnut may be an acrostic, the initials of the Latin words 'Christus Nostrum Ubique Trimphans', meaning 'Our Christ (is) everywhere triumphant'.

As these various suggestions imply, who Cnut was, where he reigned or indeed, whether he existed at all are matters of conjecture. Other inscriptions on coins of the Cuerdale hoard which are equally puzzling include Siefredus, apparently the name of a king, and two place-names of towns where coins may have been minted, Orsnaforda and several versions of Ebraice. Siefred may have been a Viking earl who succeeded Cnut as leader of the Danes in Yorkshire, though he too cannot be identified with any certainty. Orsnaforda has been tentatively identified as either Oxford or Horsforth, in Yorkshire, and Ebraice as either York, or Evreux, in northern France, but these attributions are little more than optimistic guesses.

As well as these numismatic teasers, the Cuerdale hoard contained some 1,800 silver coins minted in memory of the East Anglian king St Eadmund, who was killed by the Danes in 870 AD, about 850 coins of King Alfred, and fifty of his son and successor, Edward the Elder. There were also just over a thousand coins of European origin, mostly Frankish from mints in Touraine, and a few from further east, including Kufic, or Arabic, and Byzantine coins.

Most historians that the Cuerdale hoard was buried between 903 and 905 AD. Those were troubled times in England. King Alfred, by courage, force and diplomacy, had managed to achieve a working relationship with the Viking invaders but their share of the country, the Danelaw, covered the north and east of a line drawn from London to Chester. Alfred's death in 899 removed his restraining influence and the Vikings were soon on the rampage again. They raided Ireland and into north-west England; from the Orkneys they plundered Scotland and the Isle of Man; they even conquered the part of France which was later named after them, Normandy.

In uncertain times such as those, the safest place for a man's treasure was deep in the earth. The Vikings were particularly avid for silver, as they had no sources of supply in their native Scandinavia. Their raids and the tribute money, Danegeld, which they extracted from the notorious King Ethelred the Unready, have resulted in their being more English 10th century coins in Scandinavian museums than there are in British.

The Cuerdale hoard was so great a treasure that it almost certainly belonged to a person of importance, perhaps a Viking army commander or king. The valley of the Ribble and the old Roman town of Ribchester lay on well-defined routes which an army might use when marching from Yorkshire to North Wales or from Chester to Carlisle. Yet the hoard does not appear to have been accumulated by casual looting, since the Cunnetti coins and most of the Frankish coins seem to have been minted within a short period of time and in a limited area of either Britain or France.

Careful packaging of the hoard indicates that it was probably a consignment of coins and bullion gathered for a specific purpose. In an article in the Numismatic Gazette for December 1966, Mr M Banks suggested that the treasure may have been intended to support the English churches in the Danelaw, where they were in serious financial difficulties as a result of the Viking occupation. He also suggested that as so many of the coins were apparently minted in France, they were probably a contribution from Frankish churchmen to their less fortunate co religionists in beleaguered England.

On the other hand, Dr C H V Sutherland, in his English Coinage 600 to 900, (B T Batsford Ltd, 1973), is firmly of the opinion that almost half the coins of the Cuerdale hoard were minted by the Vikings in Northumbria and that the treasure was the property of a Viking chief and was intended for his military or administrative needs. But both writers are agreed, as so many other numismatists have been, that the secrets of the Cuerdale hoard have not yet been unveiled.

The workmen who unearthed the hoard on that May evening in 1840 certainly confirmed the Lancashire tradition that there was a vast treasure buried on the banks of the Ribble, but how it came to be there, whose property it was, and even where the majority of the coins were minted: these are questions which still await an answer.