Despite their well documented reputation for pillaging and conquest, life during the Viking Age was a bit more sophisticated—financially speaking. The Bedale hoard demonstrates this intricate economy at work—where hiding your precious metals was just good banking. The Viking Age silver uncovered in 2012. The findings also indicate that Viking metalworkers in both Scandinavia and England refined some of the Bedale hoard silver with locally available lead. “I love to think how Bedale—today a quintessentially English market town in north Yorkshire—was, in the Viking Age, at the heart of a much wider, Eurasian Viking economy,” added Kershaw.