Besides their arms, the ornaments and decorations of the Danes and Norwegians were also of a peculiar kind; at least they are in general clearly different from the Anglo-Saxon ornaments now discovered in graves in England. As the Danish and British antiquities of the earlier, or what is called the bronze period, betray a considerable and well-defined difference, so also a comparison between the corresponding antiquities of the iron period will clearly show, that even if Roman taste formed the basis of art both among the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes and Norwegians during the last-named period, yet that each people followed its own independent course. That the Northmen, consequently, were not exclusively indebted to England for all that fresh development of taste which predominated at the close of heathenism and commencement of Christianity, but that they had themselves, before the Conquest of England, already made a great step in advance, was however no more than what one might expect from a people capable of building ships that crossed the Atlantic, and who were acquainted with, and frequently used, a peculiar sort of writing, the Northern runes. But though, at present at least, it is scarcely possible to point out in England proper a single runic memorial of undoubted Danish or Norwegian origin, still there are found at times, particularly in north England, certain antiquities, with inscriptions that perfectly supply the want of those illustrations which the runic stones would otherwise afford, respecting the influence and settlements of the Northmen in England. These are small silver coins struck by Danish-Norwegian kings and jarls during their dominion there. I do not allude, of course, to coins of such kings as Canute the Great, Harald Harefoot, and Hardicanute; for as these princes held a confirmed dominion in England—and that at a time when coining was general in Europe, and when on the whole the light of history begins to shine clearer—there would be nothing strange, nor particularly instructive in an historical point of view, that they also had coined money. I refer to coins of Danish-Norwegian chiefs, whose deeds in England the chronicles have related either sparingly or not at all, and who lived more than a century before the Conquest by Canute the Great.