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century is taken to imply a shift in the patterns of warfare from mere piracy to pcnctrating expcditions.² The rationalc is that there is a greatcr chance that people, in times of warfare, bury their valuables, and indeed are killcd and are therefore prcvented from retrieving the silver. The idea that the owners of the hoards died abroad, the finds tending not to reflect local circumstances, is refuted on grounds of the change in distribution vis-a-vis the coast. We cannot belięve, for instancc, that the ninth-century Danish raiders in western Europę had their homelands only on the coasts of Denmark, nor is it likely that only people in these areas possessed silver. Moreover the inland finds of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are again relatively few, probably as a consequence of the integration of the country. Periods of unrest clearly known from history, as for example the mid-eleventh century or the mid-seventeenth century, also correspond to an inerease in the deposition of hoards of valuables.³

Nor does another proposal gain support - that the hoards are offerings. The number of finds, or the amount of silver found, do not correspond to the relative population sizes of the various provinces as measured by the agricultural potential, calculated from the so-called ‘barrels of hard corn'-values and comparable units. (In pre-industrial Denmark the spread of the population correlates strongly with the subsistence potential measured this way.)^ł 7 his would imply that the offerings wcrc carried out to very different degrees in the various areas. Nor is it any support for the theory that many of the silver-hoards come from bogs. A high proportion of the seventeenth-century finds are also from bogs, and it is hardly possible to ascribe them to Danish pagan rites at that period.⁵ On the contrary, historical sources from the sevcnteenth century tell us of people hiding their silverware in a bag, tied to a tree, and then dropping it into a lakę or bog. Furthermore, nonę of the Viking Age finds were madę together with animal bones or other indicators of offerings; nor do the depositions cease at the generał acceptance of Christianity in 1000.

This is not to deny that factors other than warfare had an impact on the picture of the finds. The spread of silver also plays a role, and the same is truć of the social distribution patterns. In the foliowing discussion, concerned with the entire area in successive periods, the amount of silver throughout the Viking Age is in focus. The size of the silver stock must have been important to the societies under the impact of a growing market economy and valuable for securing alliances and service, including protection.

Since the degree of warfare combincd with the silver importation are the main variables of the find-picture, we set up a degree of aggression (K) to isolate the size of the stock of silver. We use twenty-year periods for the era 900 to 1040, but fifty-year periods for the ninth century, where the number of finds is smali. The dating of the finds is based on the earliest possible datę of the la test coin in the hoard, the