River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  The nails were a crucial component of the ships and it’s been estimated that on large vessels, like the twenty-two-metre-long Oseberg ship found in Norway, you would have needed at least five thousand nails, meaning more than 125 kilograms of iron.[1] But even that wouldn’t have been enough because iron fares very badly in salty seas, rusting and requiring replacement pretty quickly. Ongoing repairs of rivets and nails on the move would have been crucial: not to mention those needed to repair damage a ship might have sustained in other ways, like in a battle or attack. It now seems likely the winter camps were critical for the military success of Viking expeditions because they provided the opportunity to do exactly this, and evidence for that now lay scattered on my office floor.

  The ships’ sails would also have required tremendous resources. The adoption of large textile sails for ships had developed in the eighth or maybe even the seventh century in Scandinavia, fundamentally transforming connectivity in these northern regions. The sail itself wasn’t new – sailing ships had been in use elsewhere for centuries before this – but in Scandinavia boats were typically rowed until sometime in the eighth century and it was only when sails were introduced that open sea crossings finally became practical on a grand scale. Most Viking Age sails were made of wool, because of the material’s superior qualities: you could produce heavy-duty textiles that would withstand the harsh conditions encountered as a ship thrashed in the windy, briny waves of the North Sea.

  In fact, having an intact and good-quality sail was as important as the ship itself, but this wouldn’t have come cheap. According to the eleventh-century saga of Olaf the Holy, for instance, the otherwise hardy Norwegian Asbjørn Selsbane was reduced to tears on having a precious, high-quality sail appropriated by the king’s men in partial punishment for illegally purchasing grain. When you look into the logistics of sail production, it’s easy to understand why: estimates show that a ship with thirty pairs of oars would have needed a sail that was around 120 m2, while a smaller merchants’ ship would have required one of 46 m2.[2]

  Reconstructions have shown that to produce a 100 m2 woollen sail with the methods available in the Viking Age would have taken a staggering 1292 days of work – three and a half years with no days off. You’d have needed to acquire 75 kilograms of wool, obtained from about 150 sheep. Clearly, access to these resources, to begin with, was vital for a successful raid. Maintaining sails en route, as well as repair to any damage sustained during a particularly bad storm or in battle, would have been another vital skill. Of course, sails weren’t the only use for wool, as it is likely it would also have been used for tents and clothes, with some suggesting that semi-waterproof clothing was particularly desirable for waterborne journeys – understandably so.

  Literary sources give us stories of legendary ships, but also useful insights into their making. The most infamous is the ship Ormen Lange, the ‘Long Serpent’, built by the Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason in the year 1000 according to Snorri Sturluson’s saga Heimskringla. The story goes that King Olaf commissioned the building of a new ship inspired by another he had captured, but he instructed that this should be superior in almost every way: far larger and more carefully put together, with bulwarks ‘as high as in seagoing ships’ and thirty-four benches for rowers, which would give the ship space for sixty-eight oars. The glorious Long Serpent was richly decorated: its head and arched tail gilded and its sail of magnificent proportions.

  Snorri put the success of this ship down to its master builder, a man called Thorberg Skafhog. Thorberg worked on the ship along with teams of others to fell, shape and carry wood, as well as to produce nails: everything used was of the very best. Yet his perfectionism almost lost Thorberg his life. One day he had to leave the building work to the carpenters to attend to some urgent family business. The morning after he returned, the king arrived for an inspection, whereupon the disgruntled workmen informed him that someone had destroyed the ship overnight, chipping into the planks one by one under the cover of darkness. The king got so angry he swore to end the life of whoever had done this, presuming it had been done out of envy.

  At that point Thorberg stepped forward and said he’d gladly reveal the culprit: it was, in fact, himself. He had been so disappointed by his team’s performance that he had sabotaged the ship, knowing full well that it would anger the king. On pain of death, he began repairing the planks, shaping them in such a way that the ship was declared improved and considerably more handsome. In fact, what Thorberg had done to significantly raise the quality of the ship was to make the planks not just smoother but thinner and lighter as well, and therefore more flexible in the water.

  While the story of the Long Serpent may not be entirely true, it illustrates the value placed on skilled shipbuilders and tells us something about the craftsmanship involved. Snorri’s descriptions of the Long Serpent inform us too just how many people a ship like this could hold: at least sixty-eight pairs of oarsmen and thirty extra crew in the fore-hold. This has been a crucial factor in estimating the scale of the Viking invasions. In the 1950s historian Peter Sawyer counted ships mentioned in historical sources, multiplied this by the number of seats in each and used the calculation to estimate the size of the forces.

  Larger ships were capable of holding livestock as well, including horses, which would have been of tactical advantage. There’s an example in the Bayeux Tapestry, which shows William the Conqueror’s invasion of England (William, of course, was a Norman king descendant of Viking settlers in Normandy, so the ships depicted are probably reliable representations of Viking ships). Here ships are shown with horses inside, leaping out into shallow water to take part in battle. There is evidence that the ninth-century Vikings used horses too, though we don’t know if they were transported on ships: in a reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, we hear that in 881 the ‘raiding army’ that left England for the continent was provided with horses by their defeated enemies after a battle.

  The use of ships as burial chambers is a reminder that the ship had a place in Viking Age religion too, and not just as a vessel for the journey to the afterlife. Some suggest that the boat was specifically meant to take the deceased to either Hel or Valhalla, depending on your fate. Norse mythology has a place for the boat, in the magic ship Skidbladner: this belongs to the god Freyr, the brother of Freya, and was created by the same dwarves who fashioned Thor’s hammer Mjölnir. Skidbladner was an extraordinary ship, not the largest but considered the best, of the finest workmanship: its sails magically filled with wind as soon as they were hoisted, no matter what direction it was headed in. The ship was so large that all the gods could fit on it, complete with all their weapons and war-gear, yet when it was no longer needed for a voyage, it could be packed up into tiny pieces so that ‘Freyr can fold it together like a napkin and carry it in his pocket’;[3] a Scandinavian flat-pack creation of the finest variety.

  The focus on Viking ships usually rests on their seafaring abilities, which is not surprising considering the impressive feat that travel to places like Greenland and Iceland represented. But we have known that movement along rivers was hugely important for the Viking success. This is evident both from the written records and from the distribution of archaeological sites: take Repton, Paris and Seville – all places where we know the Vikings set up camp or attacked in the ninth century, and just a few examples of sites that would have had to be approached from a river. In continental Europe, in particular, the written sources describe in detail how the Seine was utilised – actively, deliberately and with great success – by an invading Viking army. Conversely, this also required inventive methods for protection by the defending armies, as seen in a dramatic account of the 885 attack on Paris. Among other strategies, the defenders tried to defeat the attackers by throwing a burning, sticky mixture of hot wax and pitch on them, but in response the Vikings allegedly set three of their own ships alight to burn down one of the bridges that led to the towers guarding the city’s entrance. So this isn’t news: we know the
rivers were vital for the movement of the Vikings across many parts of Europe. What we don’t know are the actual details; we don’t have the physical evidence or the knowledge of how this took place. Maybe the river’s full significance as an agent in its own right has not been fully appreciated.

  THE WANDERER

  In the English Midlands, the Trent meanders silently through the Derbyshire landscape. Now the river is little more than a quiet escape from the bustle of modern life, encountered by most people only at bridges or in the occasional glimpse when travelling at speed on an A-road. Yet in the ninth century, the Trent was the source of the bustle here, although we know precious little detail. There are a few ways of tracing riverine usage in the past, with the most obvious being the historical sources in which such travel is directly described. Unfortunately, from this particular period, those are few and far between. There are written sources that are more coincidental, for instance records where ferries and crossing places are described. Indications can also be found in place names, like Twyford near Repton, suggesting the location of two crossing places – two fords. But to trace those who used the rivers for trade, warfare, transport or leisure, we need to know where those rivers themselves went in the past, and that is a bigger problem than you might think.

  It is made more complicated by the fact that rivers have a clear tendency to change course over time, so that the course today may be entirely different from what it was a thousand years ago. This is clear both at Foremark and at Repton, from both of which the Trent is now far away. In fact, the name ‘Trent’ derives from a Celtic word meaning ‘the wanderer’: a wonderfully poetic name reflecting its ability to move and change course rapidly. You can see this clearly on satellite images: the scars of past river courses mark the landscape in the form of serpentine treelines and field boundaries, standing in sharp contrast to the straight lines of modern roads and hedgerows.

  The lack of historical information from the early medieval period about the location of the Trent and other rivers presents a real problem. Maps in this part of the world are few and far between until several hundred years later, in the medieval period, and the few early maps that do exist were never meant to be used as navigational tools in the way that we would use them today. Rather, they were a way of illustrating the relationships between places on a more contextual level, making statements to illustrate anything from a historical event to a religious understanding of the world order. Take, for example, the numerous mappa mundi, early maps of the world: these typically include a breathtaking range of illustrations, from cardinal directions to flora and mythological beasts. While this can tell us a lot about the medieval mindset, it reveals little about early medieval navigation.

  One exception is the so-called Gough Map, the earliest map to show Britain in a geographically recognisable form. What is particularly useful about this map is the way that it illustrates the vast network of rivers stretching across the landmass, which is tilted unfamiliarly onto its side: tentacle-like and swirling, the rivers appear as arteries connecting towns and churches with the coastline. On this map it is the rivers that strike you as the key to communication between one place and another. This must mean that the rivers were key to travel, too.

  We are not entirely sure when the map was created, but the consensus is that it’s likely from the fourteenth century. The Trent is clearly visible, with Derby and Burton-on-Trent, located just north-east and south-west of Repton respectively, marked out, showing that travel by river all the way from the North Sea coast would not just have been possible but also common at the time. But there is still a four-hundred-or-so-year gap between this map and the ninth century, and the map’s lack of finer details means that it doesn’t really tell us much about what the Trent would have been like in the Viking Age.

  Fortunately, we now have an arsenal of scientific methods to help: from the painstaking observation of the ways in which grits, gravels and sands have moved as sediments through water, using a technique called micromorphology, to the new method of lidar – aerial-borne laser photography. This latter technique is particularly exciting as it reveals detailed imagery of height differences and topography, meaning that we can get a very accurate mapping and survey of the landscape in a way that has been impossible until now. Lidar works by a plane- or drone-mounted device emitting a pulsed laser beam towards the ground, where it reflects off any surface it meets. The pulse that is transmitted back up is measured and the distance that it has travelled is calculated; a bit like the way echolocation or sonar are used to show depths of water and to find schools of fish in the sea. Particularly usefully, the laser beams travel through foliage – in a similar way to how sunlight dapples through the crown of a tree – meaning that a highly detailed map of the lumps and bumps on the ground can be created even in a forest.

  For Great Army sites, it’s striking. In Foremark, the current meander of the Trent can be seen clearly along this stretch; as can several distinct older channels referred to as paleochannels. Before the river reaches the site, though, a definite bluff rises in the landscape, a steep limestone ridge that even includes a cave that was once an anchorage. The fields where the metal-detected finds were discovered is the first area along the stretch where you could safely have pulled up a boat or, rather, a large number of boats. Looking at the lidar maps, the location makes perfect sense.

  TOWNS ON THE MOVE

  Retracing the steps of the Great Army and the final leg of the carnelian bead’s journey to Repton means that from Foremark you have to follow the river north to Torksey in Lincolnshire. This is the site of the historically attested camp where the Great Army stayed the year before Repton, not far from the Trent’s confluence with the Humber – the gateway to central England from the North Sea. It was here, at Torksey, that discoveries made by metal detectorists over the past decade or two really began to rewrite the story of what we knew about the Great Army, forcing us to rethink the ways in which we study the Vikings in England.

  Up until the twenty-first century, our knowledge of the Vikings in England, and especially the Great Army in the ninth century, was surprisingly poor. With the exception of the excavations at Repton, most of what we knew had come from the sparse historical descriptions of the army’s movements, inevitably from the point of view of the Vikings’ opponents. The focus was firmly on the Vikings’ leaders, fleet numbers and occasional references to ‘fortresses’ or ‘fortifications’, without any elaboration of what these actually were.

  Those descriptions, combined with the archaeological evidence of the huge defensive ditch excavated by Martin and Birthe in Repton, led to a hunt for enclosed and defended camps elsewhere. Yet for the next three decades, such camps evaded discovery. Several sites in the Viking homelands displayed very visible defences, such as at the Viking towns of Birka in Sweden, at Hedeby in what is now northern Germany and at Trelleborg in Denmark: huge symmetrical earthworks created by well-organised military units with time and resources to build and to defend. Surely the force that caused so much grief for the likes of King Alfred the Great must have done the same. It turns out that the archaeologists had been looking for the wrong thing. The discovery of Torksey made this clear when a vast amount of metal-detecting finds came to light that could only be associated with the Vikings, such as dirhams, hacksilver and gold, Thor’s hammers, and large quantities of weights and measures.

  The coinage left little doubt that these discoveries should be linked with the 872–3 Great Army overwintering there.[4] The Islamic coins date from the 690s at the earliest, in the form of one Arab-Sasanian-issued coin, and continue to the 860s. Interestingly, the dates on the ninety-three dirham fragments end abruptly, with the latest dating to 866–8. This gives us a possible timeline suggesting that the last direct contact with the east took place no earlier than 866, six years before the Viking camp at Torksey.

  But while these dirhams and weights tell us so much about the Vikings’ contact with the wider world, and especially the east, it was somet
hing else that metal detectorist Rob had also found dozens of in Foremark that took us even closer to their world. He had found so many of these objects, in fact, that many had not been kept, as he had not realised their significance. A few years earlier, we had found four of them in the ground at Repton: small and rather ugly lumps of lead. The work at Torksey a few years before had demonstrated these to be the real calling card of the Great Army and this made it very exciting to find them in Foremark too.

  The lead objects are just over a centimetre in height, usually conical or oval with a flat bottom. Sometimes they are hollow, sometimes solid. Many resemble thimbles both in shape and size and we believe they are gaming pieces used to play board games like hnefatafl or similar tafl games, which are a bit like chess or draughts. We know these games were popular in the Viking Age, both from historical sources and from the presence of full sets of gaming pieces (though usually made of bone, wood or glass) found in graves across Scandinavia and in new Viking territories and settlements in places like Scotland and Ireland. That games like this were a common feature of Viking life is something we are well aware of and it’s also possible that they were part of strategic planning: it’s been suggested that the burial of elite warriors with gaming equipment signified a symbolic role in planning military activities (an intriguing hypothesis, but not one I’m sure we can really prove).

  However, gaming pieces made of lead seem to have been almost exclusively used or made in England. Most importantly, they appear to be linked specifically to the Great Army, its encampments and the parts of England where we know the Vikings either raided or settled in the early Viking Age. In fact, if you map all the gaming pieces found across the country by detectorists, the distribution matches the Danelaw division and the spread of Scandinavian place-names rather well, showing the predominant focus of Viking settlement in these northern and eastern parts of England. The gaming pieces found at Torksey exemplify how it radically changed our understanding of the Vikings’ activities in this period, shifting attention away from a fruitless hunt for fortifications (despite several seasons of excavations and surveys, there are still no signs of any deliberately made defences there) onto something that turned out to be even more important: economy and craft activities.