Dealing with Barbarians
It’s not much to look at this untidy, ignored little hillock called Norrie’s Law but it’s the place where a significant post-Roman hacksilver hoard was unearthed in the 19th century.
The view from the location, which is a ridge rather than a hill is spectacular, taking in Largo Law, the Firth of Forth and Pentland Hills beyond, to the west the Lomond Hills are now obscured by trees but possibly when the mound was made there was a view of them too.
I am reminded that it’s not necessarily the place where X marks the spot that is significant to a site.
I took the two images below in the National Museum of Scotland (NMS), they show examples of hacksilver from Traprain Law in East Lothian, some of the finds from Traprain had some ‘fairly brutal restoration work to get them to their current display condition. The work was not done by Museum conservators but professional silversmiths… The decayed silver was heated repeatedly, plunged in acid baths and hammered back into shape… Missing parts were restored, packages of silver were unfolded, damaged gilding replaced, and the whole hoard left in a shiny, impressive condition’ abridged excerpt from Scotland’s Early Silver, Transforming Roman Pay-offs to Pictish Treasures, Alice Blackwell, Martin Goldberg and Fraser Hunter.
I recently heard Dr Fraser Hunter speak about the impact of Roman silver in Scotland, silver was a new and exciting material to the local population and was used by the Romans as diplomatic gifts, but not in the form of coinage – the indigenous society had no tradition of using money. It wasn’t the merit of the craftsmanship that was valued either, but the raw material which was hacked up and folded into packets that roughly corresponded to Roman weight units. The Romans wanted to keep the natives onside.
At the museum I hunted down two examples below that came from the Norrie’s Law hoard, on the left a massive brooch without its pin (fragments of a similar design were found from a hoard at Gaulcross, near Fordyce in Aberdeenshire in 2013), and on the right the intact coiled silver ring.
The Norrie’s Law Hoard was discovered by labourers in 1819 and most of it they sold for bullion, when the landowner found out he recovered what he could from the original discovery, but kept it to himself for twenty years, this is the beginning of a very long and complex story. The hoard that eventually came to Scotland’s national archaeological collection was not all that it seemed.
