As the most prized booty of the Vikings, these precious metals became the substance of their renowned bracelets, sword hilts, and even their decorative shipboard weather vanes.

Gold and silver were also material rewards of battle. Throughout the Middle Ages, Berber traders exchanged horses, copper, and tools for gold mined in the Saharan desert, much of which would become a medium of European exchange. Gold and silver were highly sought-after commodities of trade. Confirmation of the consensual value of gold in the Middle Ages took many forms. Most monetary transactions would involve the use of metals of known quality, determined initially by weight, hardness, and so on. The first step in the establishment of money as the main basis of all value was the acceptance of gold and other precious metals as barter payments for goods.

Already in the ninth century, coins were coming into increasing use in medieval Europe. In addition to barter, which continued throughout the Middle Ages to be a part of local trade, another main method of economic exchange entered the mercantile realm: coinage, or money, as the medium. For example, a merchant might set the value of a pair of shoes consistently at a certain number of hen’s eggs, or a thrashing tool at a bushel of oats. Even the more mobile merchants of the Middle Ages could, where they developed regular trade, establish consistency in the relative values of bartered items. Relatively sedentary merchants could, however, barter goods purchased for goods they needed personally, valuing them as any buyer would for their esteemed value. Indeed, without money as the medium of an exchange, serving as a standard of value for whether an item had sold for more than it was purchased, it was perhaps more difficult for a medieval trader to determine whether he had gained in a single transaction. Even trade for some of the most prized items, salt and iron, occurred most widely by barter throughout the Middle Ages. Goods that had to be secured outside the village or manor were few in number, and they could usually be procured in direct exchange for agricultural products. Their internal economy was based on service and duties, not on payments of money. The markets for the early trader were largely the feudal village and the manor household. The earliest medieval method of economic exchange for trader and nontrader alike was barter.

Medieval bartender duties