A short stay would easily have sufficed to erect a runic or bauta-stone; and great and imminent indeed must have been the danger which threatened the Northman of the olden time if he omitted, even on a foreign soil, to perform the last honours for a fallen friend or relative. But a coin was not so quickly minted. The countries of Scandinavia had not a mintage of their own before the year 1000, or thereabout; when the Danish king, Svend Tveskjæg, having brought home with him from his expedition into England, a quantity of Anglo-Saxon coins, began to have them imitated. The Scandinavian Viking, to whom coining was a strange and unknown art, had enough to do, during a short and dangerous expedition for conquest, to procure a footing and support for his army; and if he failed in conquering a kingdom, he was glad to bring home as booty some pounds of foreign money. It was only when he had made himself king or jarl over a considerable district, and when he had begun to exchange his wild warrior’s life for the milder occupations of peace, that he could have leisure to reflect that he also, like other princes in England, should promote his people’s welfare and his own advantage by ordering those coins to be minted which are so important for trade and commerce. The older the dates of such Danish-Norwegian coins struck in England—the rarer the minting of coins in general, even in the more enlightened countries—so much the more clearly is the existence proved of well-established Scandinavian kingdoms, where works of peace were already capable of thriving. Some few years ago (1840), a highly remarkable and very ancient treasure of silver was discovered near Cuerdale in Lancashire, within the boundaries of the ancient Northumberland. It consisted of bars, armlets, a great number of pieces of broken rings and other ornaments, as well as about seven thousand coins, all of which were inclosed in a leaden chest. To judge from the coins, which, with a few exceptions, were minted between the years 815 and 930, the treasure must have been buried in the first half of the tenth century, or almost a hundred years before the time of Canute the Great. Amongst the coins, besides a single Byzantine piece, were found several Arabic or Kufic, some of north Italy, about a thousand French, and two thousand eight hundred Anglo-Saxon pieces, of which only eight hundred were of Alfred the Great. But the chief mass, namely, three thousand pieces, consisted of peculiar coins, with the inscriptions, “Siefredus Rex,” “Sievert Rex,” “Cnut Rex,” “Alfden Rex,” and “Sitric Comes” (jarl); and which, therefore, merely from their preponderating number, may be supposed to have been the most common coins at that time, and in that part of north England where the treasure had been concealed. Cnut’s coins were the most numerous, as they amounted to about two thousand pieces of different dies; which proves a considerable and long-continued coining.