by Neil Price;
Then there were the sea-clothes. As far as we can tell, these were multi-layered assemblies of coarse, thickly lined, insulated fabric able to withstand the weather of the open ocean. The Ladby ship had a crew of thirty-two, judging by the oar positions. Using the same ten-hour-day production pace as for the sails, it would have taken perhaps twenty-four person-years to fit out the crew. And added even to this are rugs, tents, a variety of other clothing (including a change of clothes for wet conditions), plus ropes, cordage, and the like.
The numbers start to blur at this point, but we might realistically speak of a year’s constant work for about thirty people to fully equip a ship and crew. By the tenth century, fleet sizes of two hundred vessels or even more were not uncommon in the European riverine campaigns. In this light, the ability to marshal and harvest the necessary resources became a statement of power in its own right. It required nothing less than a reorganisation of the landed economy.
Archaeologists have calculated that by the early eleventh century, the total sailcloth requirements of the warships, cargo vessels, and fishing boats of Norway and Denmark would have amounted to around one million square metres—in other words, the annual production of some two million sheep. Added to this is the wool required for all that warm, water-repellent clothing and bedding, the yield of three sheep being required to make the shifts of clothing needed by one person for a fishing season. A thick, heavy rug might take the annual yield of seven to fifteen animals. This extraordinarily high demand for wool makes clear that a substantial portion of the land in Viking-Age Scandinavia must have been given over to sheep farming. This is confirmed in the archaeological record, which shows massive programmes of farm consolidation at this time, with fewer but larger units of settlement.
20. Sheepscapes. The excavated village of Vorbasse in Jylland, Denmark, as it may have looked in the tenth century. The earlier landscape has been reorganised into larger estates, cleared for sheep farming. Image by and © Flemming Bau.
What appears in the later Viking Age as farm ‘abandonment’, long interpreted as some kind of population contraction (perhaps due to migration overseas), is now understood as simply a reorganisation of the landscape, presumably with larger family groups occupying the farms. To serve the wool needs of the community, especially for sailcloth, it is clear that the products of many estates must have been combined and that there was a social system for doing this—with somebody in charge. These colossal numbers of sheep would have been primarily confined to grazing land at the margins, especially heathland, which expanded dramatically in the Viking Age; approximately one hectare of heathland would provide fodder for about one to two kilograms of wool yield per year. Alongside wool production, good arable land was given over to the cultivation of fibre plants, such as hemp and flax—again with a primary use in sails, rope and rigging.
Sails capture the wind, providing a vessel with speed and manoeuvrability, but of course they are secondary to the most obvious and fundamental element of all: the ship itself. This introduces another key resource demand, the need for timber. The later Viking Age of Scandinavia was in many ways a sheepscape (to coin a term), but it was also a wooden world.
The construction not only of ships, but also of buildings, aspects of infrastructure, and defensive works, required time, expertise, and immense amounts of timber from carefully managed woodlands. Subsistence farmers and professional artisans alike would have depended on regular and reliable access to raw materials, and would have devoted serious effort to their acquisition, working, and use.
To illustrate the sheer scale of the materials needed, there is the example of the Skuldelev 2 warship, built near Dublin or Waterford but scuttled outside Roskilde in Denmark in the eleventh century. This ship was painstakingly reconstructed, using traditional techniques, by the shipwrights at Roskilde, from which it was deduced that the ship would have taken 2,650 person-days to build and an extra 13,500 hours of work on the iron for rivets and other fittings. The entire process would have also used more than two kilometres of ropes and 120 square metres of sail, in addition to other necessary components.
We should not imagine Viking-Age people simply strolling out to limitless forests to cut down a few trees. Different species were selected and maintained for their strength, flexibility, endurance, and form in relation to their intended use. Ash and lime were used for bows, shield boards, and the shafts of weapons, while hazel from regularly pollarded trees was cut for wattle-work wall panels and fencing. Oak, elm, birch, and pine were employed for buildings and ships, either as full logs or in planks radially split from the trunk. Interior details and roofing shingles were also made from wood. Wagons, sledges, dugout boats, and other vehicles further consumed vital woodland resources. Timber was also needed for everyday household vessels such as bowls and cups as well as furniture, including beds, looms, and benches, or in wealthier households, the throne-like kubbstolar chairs made from hollowed-out stumps. In short, the need for timber saturated Viking society at every level—from its greatest hall buildings and longships to lean-to shelters and brushwood for a simple fire.
Access to forested land and the right to exploit it were therefore major factors in the economy and were handed down through the generations. The management of complex woodland environments required long-term planning and investment, as a full-grown oak tree felled for a ship might have been planted sixty years earlier or more with just such an end use in mind. The possession of such resources formed a crucial component of family estates, and sometimes gave rise to conflicts over inheritance. The control of timber and woodland labour was thus linked to status and social standing, with a potential influence on power relationships in the community. This can be seen particularly clearly in the later North Atlantic colonies, where the rapid clearance of timber in Iceland had a major impact on the settlers’ lives, making them dependent on imports of wood from Scandinavia and increasing the importance of driftwood rights. Some of the ‘Vinland voyages’ to North America were probably undertaken to exploit the rich woodlands of the eastern seaboard.
When the pastoral economy of millions of sheep is combined with the enormous demands of managed woodland, with the aim of turning these raw materials into finished products, one further resource inevitably springs to mind: the need for labour on a truly massive scale. This included the people who tended the animals, took care of the pastureland, and kept up the droveways; the people who sheared the sheep, gathered the wool, and prepared it for working; the people who carded and spun the wool, and turned it into cloth; the people who managed the woodlands, felled the trees, and did the heavy work of trimming, sawing, and splitting before the master boatwrights or carpenters got to work; and the same for all the related industries—obtaining the bog iron, smelting the ore, making the nails and rivets and tools. And on and on. All these workers, in turn, had their own needs of housing and sustenance.
Textile work provides just one vivid example of the scale of labour required. We have already seen the calculations for the production of a sail, suggesting years of spinning and weaving time for one person. Obviously, these would be group activities, but even so, the work involved is staggering when considered over the entire scale of maritime and household requirements. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of textile production to the Viking economy, permeating every aspect of life. Although some products, such as sails, lasted for many years, a very large proportion of the Viking-Age population must have spent their time in textile manufacture.
In the written sources, it is abundantly clear that this work was primarily within the social sphere of women—but which women? The free female population did not suddenly expand exponentially in the course of the Viking Age. This suggests that many of these textile workers would very likely have been enslaved.
This may go some way towards explaining the numerous sunken-floored weaving huts found clustered around the halls or at settlement boundaries on sites throughout Scandinavia—buildings that proliferate just
when the landed estates are expanding in size. The conditions inside the sheds would have been horrendous. In excavations of these structures, archaeologists find lines of circular weights by the doors, where they had fallen from the looms left in place when the buildings were abandoned. The close, repetitive work was done in what light could be had, a narrow shaft of illumination surrounded by near darkness. Years spent in such dimness, trying to pick out the threads and different vegetable dyes, would have ruined the women’s eyesight. All day, tiny floating particles of wool would gradually accumulate around the work, drawn into the lungs with every breath. By evening, the air inside the huts was probably opaque and filled with the sound of coughing. In the winter darkness, it would all have been even worse, working by rushlight alone. The work was vital, the experience appalling.
The source of this unfree labour, and not just for textile work, was intimately connected with the Viking phenomenon itself and was a crucial element in the creation of the diaspora. If raiding and trading were two components of the same whole, they came together in the institution of slavery. In many cases, the Vikings’ maritime piracy produced one commodity above others: human beings, captured and enslaved.
This is not hard to understand. The raiding was in part for slaves, who were then sold on into the existing trade networks (for which they also provided a sustaining rationale) both within Scandinavia and beyond. The labour of the enslaved in turn enabled the escalation of these same activities, because it was the unfree who made it all possible. Behind the Viking fleets and crews, apparently appearing so spontaneously in the annals, lay this elaborate and cyclical system that created more of the same.
As one historian has put it, slaving was at the very core of Viking-ness. The raids were an economy in their own right.
That same economy had other outlets and conduits. One of the key social and economic transformations often said to define the Viking Age is the slow development of urbanism in Scandinavia, which paralleled similar institutional change around the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea. While there clearly was a move into towns on the Continent and in England, this was largely a legacy of the Roman urban centres that in many cases were literally still standing, waiting to be taken up again. The European cultures also retained at least some measure of active relationship to former imperial sites—whether spatial, social, or psychological. Scandinavia, by contrast, lay beyond the frontiers of the Empire and thus lacked the pre-existing (albeit decaying) urban models of Roman Europe.
It is surely significant that while the Viking-Age Scandinavians had terms for ‘market’ and ‘trading place’, they did not have a word for what we would call towns. This applies not only to such places in their homelands, where the need for an urban definition is in any case arguable, but even to the massive centres the Vikings encountered on their travels. Instead, the term garðr—usually applied to the basic unit of settlement, the individual farmstead—was employed in conjunction with qualifying words that can seem to us remarkably modest. The most extreme example is one we have already encountered: Constantinople, modern Istanbul, the capital of the Byzantine Empire and during the Viking Age the greatest metropolis in the world. It was certainly the largest settlement any Viking would ever have seen, but they called it simply Miklagarðr, the ‘big garðr’ or perhaps the ‘Great Place’, surely one of history’s more spectacular understatements and an epithet deeply suggestive of the Viking attitude to human habitations and their relative scale. Other examples include Novgorod, called Holmgarðr, or the ‘Settlement on the Island’, and so on. In most instances there is nonetheless a sense of boundedness and enclosure not found in places given other kinds of names.
The societies of England and Carolingian Frankia, with which the Scandinavians had intensive contacts, were firmly urban, as were the Arab Caliphates in the Middle East and Iberia. Technologically and socially, the Viking-Age Scandinavians could easily have developed towns like these, but for some reason chose not to do so. They travelled to cities such as Constantinople and yet in their homelands made do with single-street beach markets for centuries. The Scandinavians’ urban needs were adaptive to circumstance, and what they saw and eagerly engaged with overseas may simply not have been of much use to them at home.
This raises interesting questions as to how Viking-Age Scandinavians thought about these places, and how (or if) they saw the difference between ‘town’ and ‘country’. What did they tell each other about their experiences of urban life? What did those who had never seen a ‘town’ think such a thing looked like? Did living there confer reputation, and if so, to whom and in what way? Just as disadvantaged individuals today may dream of escaping rural poverty for life in the ‘big city’—a place that exists as much, if not more, in the mind as in reality—perhaps some Viking-Age people had similarly bruised aspirations.
Some of the Scandinavian centres occupied a middle ground between the beach emporia and the larger sites that would last into the eleventh century. In Vestfold, Norway, at the beginning of the ninth century, a settlement was founded at Kaupang. The inhabited area, spread along the shore of a protected bay a few kilometres from the mouth of the river Lågan, was divided into plots in the years around 800. Excavations have revealed few waterlogged deposits, with the exception of some latrines and wells with preserved wood, but these were enough to produce dendrochronological dates ranging from 808 to 863, a solidly ninth-century lifespan for the settlement. It covered at least five to six hectares and was set out in regular plots divided by trenches, with small structures within. The manufacturing capacities of the site can be seen in the evidence recovered from workshops, where the remains of production in bronze, silver, lead, and gold are preserved, as well as exceptional finds of moulds and crucible fragments. Lead weights were clearly a growth industry at Kaupang—several hundred have been found—and were used in everyday transactions, implying the very widespread use of bullion as a means of payment. Kilos of raw lead, used to make the original models from which clay moulds were produced, have also been recovered. One such lead piece reveals some sharp (but familiar) business practices in that it was fashioned into a form of brooch usually encountered as a high-end import to Scandinavia—in other words, the locals were making and selling their own ‘imported’ jewellery, something akin to suspiciously cheap Rolexes. Amber was also extensively worked on-site, and many objects in this material have come up in the excavations. Imports to the site included glass, carnelian beads, jet bracelets, and pottery from the Rhineland—the latter perhaps containing luxuries such as wine or oil.
But no more than that. This is what sets the tenth-century heyday of the great proto-urban centres of Scandinavia apart from the smaller markets of the 800s. The very earliest Scandinavian emporium, at Ribe, continued to expand into the ninth century, with increasing numbers of buildings and eventually a defensive ditch around the settlement. Places like Birka and Hedeby spread in every direction. (Beyond the faintly ludicrous checklists of ‘urban characteristics’ once beloved of archaeologists trying to define towns, my own criterion is very simple: lacking even the most basic sense of direction, I just ask myself if a Viking-Age settlement was so large and complex a place that I could get lost in it—if the answer is yes, it’s probably a town.)
In all these places, whole blocks of housing and workshops were springing up, and new wooden streets were being laid down. It is clear there were frequent changes to the settlements’ layout and form. Buildings tended to be short-lived, being torn down and rebuilt on the same plots. Fire was also a constant hazard, leading to a fair degree of unintended urban renewal. By the tenth century, the general pattern seems to have been for workshops to front the streets, with dwellings in the yards behind—a design repeated in Viking market centres both at home (as at Sigtuna) and abroad (as in York).
At Hedeby and Birka, the defences were strengthened and extended into the water as barrages to control access. The settlement areas themselves slowly rose too, as the ground simply built up wi
th the combined waste and detritus of urban life. When a house was pulled down, a new one was built on the flattened remains of the old, all trodden down into the mud together with the food waste, faeces, and general rubbish of the place. Sanitary it was not—you could probably smell these places a kilometre off.
Slaving was certainly present at these sites—though this does not mean they were ‘slave fortresses’ of the kind familiar from the West African coast in the early modern period. If the slave trades of later periods are any guide, no dedicated slave markets were necessary as transactions could take place almost anywhere in a settlement—on the stoops of private houses, even on street corners. Such small-scale trade, when conducted regularly, could dispose of hundreds of captives every year.
At Hedeby, for example, most of the finds of shackles and chains have come from the harbour area, presumably dropped when the enslaved were transferred onto the quays. One of the site’s investigators is convinced that most of the trading actually took place on the wharves themselves—in Hedeby’s case, those broad wooden platforms extending into the water so close together as to effectively make a floating marketplace. Some of these sales were probably seasonal—after the summer raids and before the harvest—although the trade probably continued at some level all year round.
By the tenth century, the larger seagoing boats had to moor end-on at the very limit of the platforms. Remarkable archaeological survivals enable us to see life in Hedeby harbour in close detail—from the swords that seem to have been thrown into the water as each new jetty was dedicated, to a snapshot of the market under attack. Around the year 990, a major warship burnt right in front of the jetties, perhaps in battle, so close that the fire spread to the timber platforms. Because the ship was blocking the harbour access, half of it was broken up, probably using poles pounded down into the wreck from smaller boats, and the pieces floated away to clear the path for shipping. The harbours would have required repair each spring to mend the damage of the previous winter’s ice.
