74 
NOTES ON AN EXCAVATION, ETC. 
FURTHER NOTES ON THE FOREGOING ARTICLES. 
The site of the excavation which yielded the antiquities 
enumerated is only a few yards distant from the Free Library 
and the Friends’ Meeting House in Clifford Street, where such 
abundant evidence of the Scandinavian occupation of York was 
brought to light by the excavations during 1884. The interest of 
the find in Coppergate centres upon one or two of the objects 
discovered, the character of which serves to make it one of the 
most important finds belonging to the Viking period which has 
been made in Great Britain. 
The two finds cannot be dissociated, for there is no doubt that 
the antiquities discovered are contemporaneous, although in neither 
series is there any object to which a date can be definitely assigned. 
There is however one object amongst those found in the past year 
the characteristic ornamentation of which is of assistance in fixing 
an approximate date, by comparison with objects of a similar kind 
found elsewhere. This is the brass chape of a sword sheath 
figured on plate ii. 
These ornamental terminals for sword sheaths are already 
known to us from finds in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, but 
the specimen now described appears to be the first which has been 
discovered in England/" It closely resembles a chape figured by 
Otto Rygh in his Norsks Oldsagev (fig. 515), found in Rorvik, 
Norway, which the author relegates to the second period of the 
Iron Age. The York specimen has been examined by Mr. C. H. 
Read, of the British Museum, and by Mr. Romilly Allen who 
agree in assigning a date, about a.d. 900—950, to the specimen. 
Herr Haakon Schetelig (Bergen Museum) and Dr. Sophus Muller 
(National Museum, Copenhagen), who have seen photographs, 
concur in this view as to the date, and thus there is a general 
consensus of opinion which agrees with Prof. Rygh’s date of the 
specimen figured by him. 
This period coincides with the zenith of the Norse supremacy 
over the North of England. If the Egils Saga is to be relied 
* Terminals for sword sheaths are figured by Salin, “Die altgermanische 
Thierornamentik,” figs. 448 and 491; and by Hjalmar Stolpe, “ Vendelfyndet 5 ' in 
Antiquarisk Tidskrift for Sverige, vol. 8, p. 52. (I am indebted to Mr. Romilly 
Allen for this reference). See also Sophus Muller, “ Systeme prehistorique de 
Danmark.” vol. ii. 
