page_title: Vale of York Hoard
section_title: Items
hierarchical_section_title: Vale of York Hoard / Items
caption_attribution_description: English: Silver and gold armrings and neckrings and brooch fragments from the Vale of York hoard. Discovered January 2007. Currently in the Yorkshire Museum.
context_page_description: The Vale of York Hoard, also known as the Harrogate Hoard and the Vale of York Viking Hoard, is a 10th-century Viking hoard of 617 silver coins and 65 other items. It was found undisturbed in 2007 near the town of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, England. The hoard was the largest Viking one discovered in Britain since 1840, when the Cuerdale hoard was found in Lancashire, though the Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard, found in 2009, is larger.
context_section_description: The hoard consists of 617 silver coins and 65 other items, including ornaments, ingots and precious metal.  These items were hidden in a gilt silver vessel lined with gold (variously identified as a cup, bowl, or pot) which is thought to possibly be an ecclesiastical vessel from Northern France either plundered or given as tribute.  Vines, leaves, and six running animals (two lions and four beasts of prey) decorate the cup. The cup is so closely paralleled by the Halton Moor cup, conserved in the British Museum, that both must be from the same Carolingian workshop and were produced in the mid-ninth century. The vessel was buried in a lead chest.
  A rare gold arm ring (possibly from Ireland), and hacksilver (fragments of cut metal sometimes used as currency) were also found. Reports indicate that the coins bear Islamic, Christian, and pre-Christian Norse pagan symbols: "some of the coins mixed Christian and pagan imagery, shedding light on the beliefs of newly-Christianized Vikings."
  The hoard had been protected by lead sheeting of some kind. The coins date from the late 9th and early 10th centuries, providing a terminus post quem for dating the hoard. The first theory as to a likely 10th-century occasion for such a careful burying was that it had belonged to a wealthy Viking leader during the unrest that followed the conquest of the Viking kingdom of Northumbria in the year 927 by the Anglo-Saxon king of a unified England, Athelstan (924–939). Another brief period of Viking rule in Northumbria also followed Athelstan's death in 939; it lasted until the expulsion and murder of the Viking king of Jórvík (modern-day York), Eric Bloodaxe, in 954.
  The hoard included objects from many diverse locations, including Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan, North Africa, Afghanistan, Russia, Ireland, Scandinavia, and continental Europe, "illustrating the breadth of the Vikings' travels and trade connections."  Gareth Williams, curator of early medieval coins at the British Museum, examined the artifacts.
caption: Silver and gold armrings, neckrings and brooch fragments from the hoard
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