For a king whose life mostly survives through hostile chronicles and sagas written centuries after his death, the most trustworthy witness to Eric Bloodaxe's reign isn't a story at all. It's a coin — struck in silver, in his name, in the city he ruled, while he was actually ruling it.
The Coins Themselves
Numismatists have identified two distinct types of penny minted for Eric at York. One, catalogued as N549, carries the moneyer's name written out horizontally, split across the coin. The other, N550, has the name inscribed around the coin's edge and, more strikingly, a sword symbol stamped on the obverse — a small but pointed piece of self-presentation from a king whose byname was already built around a blade. As of the most recent survey, around thirty-one surviving examples of Eric's coinage are known.
The Men Who Struck Them
The coins name their moneyers: Ingelgar and Radulf. Both men also struck coins for Aml¡ib — better known as Olaf — Eric's Norse-Gaelic rival for control of Northumbria. That detail says something the sagas never quite capture: the York mint didn't belong to any one king. It was infrastructure, staffed by the same craftsmen regardless of who currently held the throne, quietly continuing to operate through a decade of rulers rotating in and out of power.
Dating a Reign Through Metal
Eric held Northumbria twice — roughly 947 to 948, and again from 952 to 954 — with Olaf ruling in between. Historians believe the two coin types likely correspond to these two separate reigns, giving numismatists a way to anchor his periods of control that doesn't depend on a single chronicler's memory or a saga writer's chronology decades later. Where the written sources blur and contradict each other, the coins hold a fixed point.
Why This Matters More Than It Sounds
It's easy to treat coinage as a footnote to the "real" story — the battles, the betrayals, the sagas. But for a figure this contested, physical evidence minted in his own lifetime is worth more than pages of later narrative. It's the difference between a story about a king and proof that one actually sat on that throne, in that city, in that decade, with real mints striking real silver in his name. Everything else — the violence, the marriage to Gunnhild, the exile, the death at Stainmore — is reconstructed from sources written well after the fact. The coins were struck while it was still happening.
Eric's pennies sit alongside a wider pattern of Viking-Age silver surfacing across the North Sea world — see our piece on the 3,000 Viking coins found in Norway for what a much larger hoard can reveal about the same turbulent decades.
Carry the History
👉 Eric Bloodaxe T-Shirt – Viking King of Norway & Northumbria
👉 Eric Bloodaxe Sweatshirt – Viking Warrior Crewneck
👉 Eric Bloodaxe Gift Tee – Viking King in a Gift Box
👉 Eric Bloodaxe Tote Bag – Viking Royalty Axe Canvas Tote
Further reading: Was Eric Bloodaxe Real? What the Historical Record Actually Shows — What Erik Bloodaxe Wore, Carried and Drank From — Jorvik: What It Was Actually Like to Live in Viking York