Wadmal

A coarse woollen cloth used as currency across the Norse world, measured in cuttels and ells.

Wadmal is a heavy undyed woollen twill, woven on the warp-weighted loom, and across the Norse world it was money. Not a commodity that could be bartered — money, with exchange rates set by law against silver and against cattle.

In Iceland it was the dominant legal currency for something like six centuries, and the law fixed the length, width, thread count and weight of each grade, with penalties for passing defective cloth. One saga has a man outlawed for selling wadmal full of holes, which is a counterfeiting case in all but name.

Shetland used it the same way, and the rates are recorded: six cuttels made an ure of valuation, twenty cuttels bought a sheep, and six score — a long hundred — bought an ox.

It is worth sitting with what that means. The currency was manufactured at home, mostly by women, on equipment every household owned. A family that could weave could mint, and the money supply of the North Atlantic was limited by how much wool could be spun.