Iceland

Medieval Iceland had almost no coin of its own. Value was reckoned instead in vaðmál, a standardised homespun woollen twill measured in ells, and in livestock: one hundrað, the basic unit of account, meant a hundred and twenty ells of legal cloth, and a hundrað and a kúgildi, the value of one milch cow, were equal. The law books fixed the parities, the older standard being six ells to the ounce of silver, so that a hundred in cloth answered to twenty ounces; by the later middle ages the cloth ounce had drifted to nine, ten, eleven or twelve ells and had become a pure money of account. Because cloth was money, weaving was a monetary act, and everything from a farm to a chalice was quoted in hundreds. The record is exceptional: from the twelfth century every church kept a máldagi listing its land, stock, vestments, images and books, and the bishops added running accounts of what each priest owed and paid. Thousands were printed in Íslenzkt fornbréfasafn from 1857, so Iceland can price liturgical art where most of Europe cannot.

Making a film here? The Canada–Iceland corridor covers the treaty, the incentives, and where to start.