Have you ever wondered why one of Ruan Cathedral's towers is called the Tower of Butter, or what

animals have faced trials in courts for, or even how the black country got its name?

Well, you can find the answers to questions like these and hundreds more in our new book,

The History Hit Misscellanie. It's the perfect present for any history fan.

It's available to buy now from your favourite bookshop or by visiting historyhit.com forward slash

book. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr Cat Jamon.

Frading, trading and settlement are all key parts of the Viking phenomenon,

and it's our coincidence that several large kingdoms were formed in precisely this period.

We also are starting to know more about how silver and other traded commodities

make journey's vast distances from east to north to west. How interconnected were

these different phenomena, and what about big towns turning into cities later on, like Dublin

and York? How much were these parts of that big Viking network? A new book is now investigating

exactly this, and today I'm talking to the author of that book, Dr Tom Horn.

Tom got his PhD in Viking Age Archaeology from the University of Glasgow, and his book is called

A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain. Trade networks and the importation of a southern

Scandinavian silver bullion economy. So Tom, thanks so much for joining us on Gone Medieval today.

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, hopefully we're going to have some good fun talking about

Vikings and trade and money and vast distances and all the really cool things.

Exactly, and I just think for full disclosure here, we should probably say that you have been part

of my team's working with me at lots of different Viking Age sites, including the Viking campaign

Reptine and also our roots sites in Ukraine. So we've worked on a lot of these sites together

over the past few years. So yeah, basically what Kat is saying that she knows I talk a lot of rubbish

...