On Sun, 06 Jun 2004 09:58:41 GMT, Inger E Johansson wrote:

actually not entirely Eric,
you happened to present me with information same day as I was 'hunting' the
Icelandic Annals for a detail re. a person mentioned in a diploma from 1430
as having had his silvership(traded Silver from Iceland to Orkney and Lynn)
hijacked by English pirates short after leaving Reykjavik. I linked that
person, due to some information in the diploma, to other diplomas among them
that where King Erik call for the English King to settle the claims due to
English fisherman fishing in Icelandic and Greenlandic waters the last 20
years (410's on forward) and the English pirates who hijacked the
Norse-Danish-Swedish King's merchandiser ships, including one of the Royal
knarr btw.

This link: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/w...s/mnm_mt28.pdf
is about medieval textiles, and says " Early in Icelandic
history, when silver was plentiful but cloth was
scarce, six ells of vaðmál (the standard legal tender
grade of 2/2 twill wool cloth) were worth one eyrir, or
about 24.5 grams of silver (Hoffmann, 195). As the
years went on, this number ballooned to 48 ells before
stabilizing at about 45 ells around the year 1200
(Dennis et al., 21n, 269n)."

http://insci14.ucsd.edu/~jablum/iceland.pdf which is about politics says
there was precious little silver.

So that's not very helpful.

I am also trying to track the silver monted coconut-bowl which were among
the items Ivar Bardson delivered from Vinland as part of the tithes from
Vinland. It may take some time to put all the lines from Stavanger to Rome
together here. Seems as if it might have been sold in Flandern but I really
hope not. More as soon as I have followed that one up.

Coconut bowl? Where can we read about this?

Doug