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An English King Minted These Coins to Ward Off a Viking Invasion. Instead, the Seafaring Raiders Turned the Pennies Into Jewelry
Key takeaways
- Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History
- “The coins were a kind of prayer—part of a broader religious response to the Viking attacks,” Gitte Tarnow Ingvardson, a curator at the National Museum of Denmark, tells Smithsonian magazine.
- More than a millennium later, two of these so-called Lamb of God coins have resurfaced in Denmark, the country that Thorkell and his fellow raiders called home.
Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History
Add as preferred source Different metal detectorists discovered the two "Lamb of God" coins at separate locations in Denmark. John Fhær Engedal Nissen / National Museum of Denmark When Viking raiders led by the imposingly nicknamed Thorkell the Tall besieged England in 1009, the kingdom’s leader, Aethelred II, concluded that the invasion was punishment for his people’s sins. To atone for these wrongs, the English king ordered his subjects to engage in three days of penance by fasting, offering alms, walking barefoot to church and attending mass. Aethelred also had a new type of penny minted, imbuing it with religious symbolism intended to ward off the invaders.
“The coins were a kind of prayer—part of a broader religious response to the Viking attacks,” Gitte Tarnow Ingvardson, a curator at the National Museum of Denmark, tells Smithsonian magazine. “Only a few examples have survived to the present day, which suggests that the coinage was limited in scale.”