Faith and Fortune: Ritually Folded Coins in Medieval Norway

The documented medieval practice of deliberately folding coins for devotional and intercessory purposes has received significant attention in recent years. While contemporary written sources describe the practice as a distinctively ‘English custom’, growing numbers of finds from elsewhere in Europe and North America suggest that the practice was observed far beyond these traditional chronological and geographical borders. This article presents new evidence for the pursuit of the ‘English custom’ in medieval Scandinavia, based on a corpus of 16 single finds of folded coins held in the Coin Cabinet of the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo.