The art of the silversmith: stamped decoration on Viking silver

Stamped decoration is ubiquitous on Viking silver. This blog takes a quick look at how it was executed.

Within Scandinavia, the two most common shapes for stamps to take were ring-stamps and triangles, often containing 1 or 3 pellets. Often, two triangles were placed end-on-end creating an hourglass shape.

Such simple shapes were relatively easy to produce. In most cases, a punch was applied to the surface of the object soon after casting. To avoid a double impression, the punch had to be made in a single blow. Actual examples of punches used to create the ornament are rare, but one example comes from a late Viking-Age tool chest found at Mästermyr on Gotland. This is essentially a square iron rod, which originally had an hourglass shape on the striking face (it’s now very worn). A lead pad from the same tool chest seems to have been a testing piece for this stamp and others: it is covered on both sides with stamped hourglasses and rings.

Lead trial piece for triangular stamps,
from Torksey, Lincolnshire
(my photo, taken at the Fitzwilliam Museum)

But although the stamps themselves are rare, there are a few examples of other trial pieces, always made of lead. Three come from the Viking winter camp of Torksey, Lincolnshire, which the Vikings occupied in 872/3, at the height of their raiding activity in Britain. One of these, pictured to the right, has about twenty punches of a triangle with three dots – a form of decoration that could have been applied to Scandinavian neck-, arm- or finger-rings. When not busy taking over Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, it seems the Viking army was producing decorated silver ornaments (among other items). 

Despite the practice that the trial pieces imply, surviving ornaments show that the application of stamps was not an exact science – stamps were not always evenly applied, and some even contain cracks (see blog post below). This is the case with some unusual trefoil-shaped stamps on a silver arm-ring from a Viking-Age hoard from Yorkshire, which I studied at the Yorkshire Museum. The first stamps were applied in the middle of the ring, and are intact, but as the silversmith moved towards the outer edges of the ring, a crack appeared in the punch. This is clearly visible where the lozenge ornament has split, especially on the upper level of the ring.

Silver arm-ring from Yorkshire with stamped trefoils. The punch cracked partway through, resulting in splits in the decoration. My photo, taken at Yorkshire Museum.

Interestingly, it wasn’t always necessary to punch the silver after casting. Sometimes, the ornament could be stamped into a beeswax model, and that model used to create a clay mould from which silver objects could be cast. This is clearly demonstrated by a terrific find from the harbour site of Fröjel, Gotland: it’s a Viking-Age clay mould which preserves stamped hourglass decoration, neatly picked out in the drawing (see here for other examples). This mould would have been used to cast decorated silver arm-rings.

 

A mould fragment (right) shown together with a modern clay imprint, with stamped hourglass decoration.
Image © Anders Söderberg

An illustrated database of stamps - building on James Graham-Campbell's recent work in this book - would be of great help in establishing workshop traditions and links between different objects.