Norway
Medieval Norway reckoned in the mark, divided into eight øre of three ørtugar. Its charters distinguish sharply between the mark of coined pennies, whose silver content fell steeply across the fourteenth century, and the mark brent — burnt, that is refined, silver of roughly 985 fineness, weighed rather than counted. The Norwegian mark of weight held at about 214 grams from Magnus Lagabøte’s reforms until the mid-sixteenth century, so a sum in burnt marks is a figure a modern reader can put on a scale; sums given instead in kyrlag or in laupar of butter need a much longer chain of reasoning. The documentary base is unusually good for a small northern kingdom. The Diplomatarium Norvegicum gathers some twenty thousand charters of 1050 to 1590 in twenty-three printed volumes, now fully searchable, and the runic business letters excavated from the Bergen wharf add an everyday commercial voice preserved almost nowhere else. Much of the surviving expenditure is ecclesiastical, and it buys designed things: cathedral fabric, altars, copied books and elaborate sung commemorations.
Gold weight and purity converter →Making a film here? The Canada–Norway corridor covers the treaty, the incentives, and where to start.