Britain in the Middle Ages: An Archaeological History. Francis Pryor

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      FIG 7 The general pattern of Viking raids and migrations in north-western Europe from just before AD 800 until the eleventh century.

      Their non-existent horned helmets aside, the Vikings are justly celebrated for their superbly graceful, clinker-built sea-going vessels, known as longships. The tradition of clinker building in northern Europe predates the Vikings, and was to persist until the fifteenth century for large sea-going vessels, when it was replaced by carvel or frame construction.* The Viking longship was a superb vessel. I remember coming across one in a rather run-down state, very dusty and liberally spattered with pigeon droppings, in a shelter on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. A faded plaque declared that she was a full-scale replica that had been sailed across the Atlantic for the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Viking, as she was named, was a copy of the Gokstad ship which was discovered in Norway in 1880. ³Nobody was around, so I had a Viking longship that had crossed the Atlantic all to myself for an hour or so, until it started to get dark. It was an experience I will never forget.

      The first thing that struck me about the Viking was her size. She seemed tiny for a vessel that could take the worst that the North Atlantic had to offer. I was reminded of this ten years later when I visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, in 1987. I was on a circuit of Continental tourist attractions as part of the feasibility study I undertook before we opened Flag Fen to the public. I had spent the morning sampling the delights of Legoland, and was eager to escape clever things made from plastic bricks, so I headed out to Roskilde. I was looking across the harbour when I noticed that in amongst the yachts and pleasure craft was a replica Viking ship (a large one, but not one of the ocean-going warships), with another, much smaller boat moored at the shore. By modern standards they were tiny.

      Maritime archaeologists have realised that many of the handling characteristics of full-sized vessels can be replicated in half-scale models, with the help of some simple mathematics.⁴ These smaller vessels also present the shipwrights involved in their construction with most of the technical challenges faced by their ancient counterparts, but at considerably reduced expense. So far half-scale models have been constructed of a smaller Viking-age vessel, the fourteen-metre clinker-built Graveney boat, which it is estimated could have carried a cargo of six to seven tonnes. This vessel, which was abandoned in the mid-tenth century, was carrying a cargo that included (presumably Kentish) hops – comprehensively destroying the myth that all medieval ale was unhopped. The half-scale model of the Sutton Hoo ship, a twenty-eight-metre vessel, has been named the Sae Wylfing. I have seen her in action, and I was particularly impressed by her lightness – she could easily be dragged up onto a sloping beach by her crew, and would not require a quay unless heavily laden. The constructors of the Sae Wylfing were so impressed with her handling in rough water that they were inclined to attribute much of the political success of the builders of her original to such vessels.⁵ It is thought that the Sutton Hoo vessel was buried within a barrow mound to commemorate or conceal the last remains of King Raedwald of Essex, one of the Wuffingas, the early kings of Saxon East Anglia.

      Boat or maritime archaeology has become a sub-discipline in its own right, and landlubbers are advised to walk its companionways with extreme caution. Its practitioners can be as ferocious as Captain Bligh. So the point I want to make has to be simple: yes, ocean-going Viking longships were quite probably the finest open clinker-built vessels ever built, but they were not the only ships afloat at the time – we know of many humbler boats from Viking Britain – and they were not ‘the reason’, as I was taught at school, that the Vikings voyaged abroad. The Vikings came first, the ships second. In other words, the longships were built because the men who sailed them wanted to travel and had the necessary skills to build them.⁶ It was not the other way around.

      It should also be stressed that Viking longships did not appear, as it were, out of the blue. They can be seen to form part of an evolutionary tree whose roots probably extended back to the Early Bronze Age, around 1900 BC, when the first plank-built boats (found at Ferriby on the Humber) made their appearance. These boats could have crossed the Channel, and were probably used for trade along the coast. By the Late Bronze Age (say 1000 BC) trade and exchange around the North Sea was taking place on a regular basis. During Roman times Britain exported huge amounts of grain across the Channel to feed the later Roman field armies. We know that the Anglo-Saxons were excellent sailors, and we have evidence for this in the clinker-built ship from Sutton Hoo, dating to around AD 625. This vessel superficially resembles a Viking longship, and would have been perfectly capable of crossing the North Sea. And of course in the previous chapter we saw the extent of trade throughout northern Europe in the Middle Saxon period and afterwards. So Viking ships, like the Viking phenomenon in general, were part of a process that had roots many centuries old.

      Viking warships, and some Viking art, were intended to strike terror into their enemies, and in this they undoubtedly succeeded, because images of Viking ships, such as that in wrought СКАЧАТЬ