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the importance of thc intemal structures, no social system is fully understood from this perspective alonc.

C. Nordic coinage

As noted, the silver, including the thousands of foreign coins, was normally used for making ornaments of local forms and decorated in the characteristic Nordic styles. Ultimately, most of thejewellery was cut to pieces and along with coins employed in exchanges, to which the scalcs and weights, especially of the tenth and cleventh centuries, bear witness. A smali amount of the silver, however, was used for the early local minting, and even if many Danish and foreign coins were pierced, or otherwise treated, and used as ornaments, sonie true coin transactions must have taken place, at least at Hedeby.

The Nordic coins of the ninth cen tury seem to have been struck at Hedeby (Fig. 41).¹⁰ They imitate Frankish coins of Charlemagne from Dorestad in the Netherlands and a number of other Frankish coins, especially thc types with ships of Louis the Pious. The Nordic coins do not carry the name of the mint, nor of any Danish lord, so we do not know if local kings were involved, though it is likely. Another model for the Nordic coins is Frisian (and English) ‘Sceattas’ with face masks and animals. The imitations of these are minted from about 825 and until about 850, while the ‘Charlemagne’ series belongs to about 825.

In contemporary finds these Nordic coins occur only at the ports of Hedeby,¹¹ Kaupang in Southern Norway¹² and Birka in mid— Sweden,^i;J in a solitary Norwcgian grave¹⁴ plus, possibly, a Danish burial, and on a market settlement (Lóddekópinge in Skane).¹⁵ Almost all the specimens from Birka are found in women’s graves and havc, except for a single coin from a purse, been pierced or equipped with a suspension. The coin from the above settlement is pierced; so too were the coins from the Norwegian burial which were worn as trinkets. These early Nordic coins may have been in use as a means of exchange at Hedeby only; the specimens from Kaupang and the Danish grave are fragmentary and perhaps also trinkets. Not until the tenth century are Nordic coins spread widely outside the towns and perhaps accepted as a generał means of payment without being constantly weighed. At Hedeby the ninth-century coins may have been sent into circulation as some kind of payment, serving as a status symbol for the persons using them and thereby also facilitating minor transactions. Obviously the rare early coins were not meant for the population at large, and apparently they were not given a generalised political value for propaganda purposes.

The ninth-century coins come from about forty localides in a total of only 69 specimens, according to a stocktaking in 1966.¹⁶ This is in strong contrast with the Nordic coins of the tenth century, stemming