Pictish Mystic · Lore · Picts

The St Ninian's Isle Treasure: Pictish Silver Under a Shetland Church Floor

The St Ninian's Isle Treasure: Pictish Silver Under a Shetland Church Floor

On 4 July 1958, on his first day as a volunteer on a university dig in Shetland, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy named Douglas Coutts lifted a broken stone slab marked with a cross. Underneath lay the remains of a wooden box and twenty-eight pieces of silver and silver-gilt, made around AD 750 to 825. National Museums Scotland calls it the only Scottish hoard of fine metalwork of this date to survive in its entirety, and most of it is thought to be Pictish. This is part 14 of our Picts series. As always, history, legend and scholarly debate are kept apart, and the sources are named.

History (The Dig on the Isle)

St Ninian's Isle lies off the west coast of the South Mainland of Shetland, in the parish of Dunrossness. A medieval chapel stood there, and the burial ground around it was used until about the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1951, at the first Viking Congress, the Aberdeen scholar W. Douglas Simpson suggested the site was worth searching. From 1955 to 1959 students from the University of Aberdeen dug there each summer under Andrew O'Dell, Professor of Geography.

Beneath the late twelfth-century chapel they found an older church. Rachel Barrowman's later Glasgow University re-excavation (published 2011) dated the first church to the eighth century and showed it was built over a late Iron Age settlement.

Coutts later remembered trowelling for about an hour when "a thin stone slab" was levered up and he saw "a hollow with some green material" in it. He called the professor, and the find was kept quiet.

History (What Was in the Box)

O'Dell's report in Antiquity (1959) describes a broken sandstone slab, about 10.5 by 15 inches, lightly inscribed with a cross, lying close to the foundation of the south side of the chancel arch. Later graves had missed it by inches. The box was of larch, and only a few splinters survived, preserved by the metal salts. The bowls lay upside down and the brooches were tangled together, which suggested a hurried burial.

The hoard, as listed by Katherine Forsyth in 2020, is:

With them lay part of the jawbone of a porpoise. National Museums Scotland groups the silver into three sets: feasting, weapons and jewellery.

History (The Words on the Chape)

One chape, the silver tip of a sword scabbard, carries an inscription (NMS FC 282). On one side it reads INNOMINEDS, which Kenneth Jackson expanded as "in nomine D(ei) S(ummi)", "in the name of God the Highest". On the other side, in smaller script, it reads RESADFILISPUSSCIO.

The chape is worn, buckled and repaired, so it had a long working life before it went into the ground.

History (Treasure Trove and the Udal Law Case)

The find was kept secret until the silver had been flown to London. Then came a legal fight. The landowner was James Budge of Bigton. The University of Aberdeen argued that Shetland still kept its old Norse udal law, under the code of King Magnus Hakonsson "the Law-mender", from about 1274. That would have split the treasure three ways, between the king, the finder and the owner of the land.

The Crown argued that ownerless treasure belongs to the Crown under Scots law ("quod nullius est fit domini regis"). The Lord Ordinary found for the Crown, and on 2 August 1963 the Inner House of the Court of Session agreed (Lord Advocate v University of Aberdeen and Budge). The judges held that the law of Magnus was no longer the law in Shetland. The hoard went to the national collection in Edinburgh. Today it is on display in the National Museum of Scotland, Early People gallery, as museum numbers X.FC 268–296.

The treasure went back to Shetland for display in 1966, when the first Shetland Museum opened, and again in 2008 for the fiftieth anniversary of the find. Replicas are on show in Shetland.

Legend (Saint Ninian and the Viking Story)

The isle's name comes from Saint Ninian. Bede, writing about 731, says that Nynia, a Briton, converted the southern Picts from his church at Candida Casa, Whithorn. There is no evidence that Ninian ever came to Shetland. Charles Thomas called a Ninian mission here unlikely, and Forsyth suggests the dedication reflects his late medieval cult. Local people still venerated the old church in the early eighteenth century.

The best-loved story is that monks or islanders, seeing Viking sails, hid their silver under the church floor and never came back. The hurried packing fits, and Thomas linked the burial to the first Norse raids around 800. Forsyth says this idea "has been widely accepted", but warns that it would be unwise to rely on it to date the hoard: the silver could just as easily have been lost in local conflicts before or after the Vikings came.

Debate (Church Plate or Secular Wealth?)

In the early 1960s David McRoberts read the hoard as church plate, with bowls used as chalices. Most scholars now follow the 1973 publication by Small, Thomas and Wilson: the hoard is Christian, but mostly secular. James Graham-Campbell points out that the silver varies in purity, and that the pieces are worn and repaired, so they were gathered over a long time. Forsyth lists other possibilities: gifts from lay patrons to the church, valuables held there for safe keeping, or pledges.

Debate (Pictish or Anglo-Saxon?)

Isabel Henderson stressed the hoard's "essential Pictishness", and David Wilson agreed. Leslie Webster argues that the pommel and the inscribed chape are Mercian (Anglo-Saxon) imports, or Pictish copies of them. Henderson replied that the Picts "had assimilated rather than copied". She pointed to the alliance between the Pictish king Onuist son of Uurguist (729–761) and Æthelbald of Mercia.

The inscription sits in the middle of this argument. Kenneth Jackson read the reverse as two unknown names, "Resad son of Spusscio". David McRoberts took SPUSSCIO as the usual short form of Spiritus Sancti, "of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". Michelle Brown went further and read the whole line as Latin, "res ad Fili Spiritus Sancti", "property of the son of the Holy Spirit". Forsyth notes that this reading removes any link with Pictland, and that it has found favour with those who see the chape as Anglo-Saxon.

Forsyth (PSAS 149, 2020) argues instead that Resad is the expected Pictish form of a Brittonic man's name, known in Gaulish as Redsatus or Ressatus. She reads the rest as a prayer in the name of the Trinity, with the final O standing for a shortened word, perhaps "o(ra pro) Resad", "pray for Resad". Her title asks the question: "Protecting a Pict?" If a Pictish name was part of the chape from the start, she says, the case for an Anglo-Saxon origin is "severely weakened".

Pretani and Cruithin

Resad's name belongs to the Brittonic language family. The Greeks called Britain's peoples Pretanoi, and Irish writers called the Picts Cruithin or Cruithni, the same old name as the Cruthin of Ulster. In a box under a Shetland church floor, one of those northern Britons left his name, scratched in silver.

Sources

History, legend and scholarly debate are marked separately in the headings above.

First shared on X @dalriada36963.

Read in the Pictish Mystic app · Draw a free Pictish rune reading

‹ Previous · Next ›

Built by Apex Website Builders