Silver and Names: Viking Hoards and Norse Place Names in Britain

The Viking Age left two widespread kinds of evidence on the map of Britain: hoards of buried silver, and settlement names with Old Norse elements such as -by, -thorpe and -thwaite. Both are used to map Scandinavian activity, but they are rarely compared directly. I compare them using the 19 Viking hoards in Wikipedia's List of hoards in Great Britain and all 43,274 settlements in Ordnance Survey's OS Open Names, of which 1,360 carry a Norse element under narrow, documented rules. Around the 17 hoards that can be placed to village level, 10.0% of settlements within 15 km have a Norse name, 3.19 times the mean for randomly chosen settlements (one-sided p = 0.002 from 20,000 draws), and clearly more than around hoards of other periods from the same list (Mann-Whitney p = 0.016). The result holds at 10 and 25 km and with a broader element set. Twelve of the fourteen English Viking hoards lie north and east of an approximate Danelaw line. The agreement has striking exceptions. Five hoards, all either from the late 9th century or the early 11th, have no Norse-named settlement within 15 km. Conversely, Lincolnshire holds 294 Norse-named settlements, 23% of England's, and no listed Viking hoard. Hoards are not unusually close to the coast or major rivers. The largest, Cuerdale on the Ribble, lies where Norse names are scarce. Silver and names broadly agree, but they record different things: settlement on one hand, and the movement and loss of wealth on the other. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/viking-silver/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/viking-silver. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/viking-silver/.