Viking Era

Thoughts on the legacy of the Vikings and economic development

A group of armed Vikings, standing on river shore. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

This blog focuses on the finances of ancient times, with minimal focus on the overall society and culture.

Perspectives of the Vikings have varied over time, ranging from them being vicious brutes pillaging everything they could find (according to the Christian monks suffering at the hands of the Vikings) to brave explorers and traders.

For just this post, I’ll touch on those issues. Actually, the following comments all affect the economic world of the Viking Age.

Chapter 3 of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings points out the occasional tendency to romanticize the Vikings. Some focus on their brave exploration and merchant trading abilities. There’s even a school of thought that considers them to be misunderstood victims of hostile PR reports from Christian monks. Another school of thought emphasizes there were merely one part of the typically brutal medieval age.

In The Viking Legacy, the closing chapter of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, Peter Sawyer explores the political, cultural, and economic changes during the Viking Age.

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Middle Ages, Roman Empire, Viking Era

Gross World Product over last 27,000 years

Gross World Product, according to Wikipedia is

the combined gross national product of all the countries in the world. Because imports and exports balance exactly when considering the whole world, this also equals the total global gross domestic product (GDP).

I got curious about the world-wide GDP after thinking about two previous posts:

What would happen if you multiplied the drastic increase in  population with the radical increase in per capita income? I made a feeble effort to multiple the two data sets and quickly realized that wouldn’t work. Poked around a bit on the ol’ internet thingie and found the answer at Wikipedia – gross world product is what I was looking for.

This discussion is cross-posted from my other blog, Outrun Change, because the ancient data is relevant to this blog.

27,000 year time horizon – Check out the graph at top of this post for the estimated gross world product on a very long time horizon, specifically from estimates back in 25,000 B.C. through 2014 A.D.

Copyright notice:  Graphs in this post are based on data in an article titled “Gross world product” by Wikipedia, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.  As a result the following tables which are derived from this information are licensed for use by anyone under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Any use of these graphs must in turn be distributed under the same license.

I will show the raw data at the end of this post.

With that 27,000 year time horizon, there is a radical turn in the 1900s, at which point the graph appears to goes from horizontal to straight up vertical.

That is too long of a time horizon to understand, so I broke it out into smaller blocks.

Last 2,000 years – To remove the many earlier millenniums of slow growth, time horizon was revised to 1 AD through now. Notice there is still a radical change in the 1900s. With the dramatic changes in the last 200 years, the line from earlier looks like it is flat, but it isn’t.

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Middle Ages, Roman Empire, Viking Era

Growth in world population

Our World in Data, the web site of Max Roser, visualizes data in amazing ways. Check out this graph of world population:

“World Population over the last 12,000 years and UN projection until 2100” by Our World in Data is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.  The graphs which follow are derived from this information and are licensed for use by others under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Very cool. The dramatic expansion in the number of people is amazing.

This discussion is cross-posted from my other blog, Outrun Change, because it provides context for past and future discussions of ancient finances.

The graph includes projections through 2100. I pulled out the projections and developed the following graph:

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Viking Era

Fragments of information on the count of ships in Viking raiding parties

A decent size Viking raid – I count ten ships in sight. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Some fragmented counts on the size of Viking raids are provided on page 39 of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, edited by Peter Sawyer. The number of ships reported and recorded for some raids between 789 and 896 are listed. That would be essentially the 9th century.

This will be first in a series of posts on tidbits of information I found particularly interesting in the book.

Author points out we need to be careful in relying on the reported number of ships. In addition, it is not possible to calculate the size of particular raiding parties (assuming the reported number of ships is actually correct) since ships varied dramatically in size. Text says they could carry anywhere from 10 to 60 warriors.

Author points out that exaggeration is possible in all the reported data. I’ve also learned that ancient data is often rounded. Thus the report of “100” ships could be 60 or 80. Or maybe it was 120 or 140 ships. Or maybe nobody even tried to count but to give an idea that it was a really large raid the symbolic number of ‘100’ was recorded.

To get a wild guess on the size of raiding parties, I’ll extend out the ship count in the text.

Author estimates the range of warriors per ship ran from 10 to 60. The midpoint of those two amounts would be 35 warriors.

I’ll guess the range of warriors is between 20 and 60 per ship.

Following data lists the year, location, and reported ship count. Following that is the number of warriors at my low estimate of 20, my high estimate of 60 per ship, and a midpoint of the author’s range.

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Middle Ages

Illustration of 16th century armament

All photos by James Ulvog taken at Cabrillo National Monument.

The Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego describes the expedition by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo to explore the west coast of what is now the U.S.  He arrived in San Diego harbor in October 1542.

In the museum, there are two models demonstrating replicas of 16th century arms.

The crossbowman above is wearing a metal helmet and hip length chain mail.

He is armed with a metal cross-bow and is preparing to load it. His foot is in the stirrup. The “goat’s foot” in his left hand will be used to pull the string back and latch it to the trigger catch.

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Viking Era

Construction time of one longhouse and perimeter of winter camp in Viking Era

Viking house in the city of Hobro, Denmark. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The estimated construction time of one longhouse and the protective moat and wall around a winter camp is provided by Kim Hjardar and Vegard Vike in their book Vikings at War.

At location 2671, the authors descibe a fort at Fyrkat, near Hobro, in the south of Denmark. The fort was about 390 feet across. It held 16 longhouses, laid out in quadrants.

Size of the longhouses was about 93’ long by 24’ wide by 25’ tall. (I don’t get the reason for a 7.5 meter height, but the photo above gives an idea). The main rooms were about 51’ long, with a smaller room at each end.

Of particular interest to me, the authors say that from 1982 through 1984, one of the longhouses was reconstructed using the types of materials, tools, and techniques that the Vikings would have used.

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Viking Era

Background on Viking Age – raising the warriors for battles – 5 of 5

Standard Viking battle formation. “Shield Wall” by Lil Shepherd is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Raising warriors for a battle was based on a levy system, called the leidang.

Viking Age: Everyday life during the extraordinary era of the Norsemen, by Kirsten Wolf, explains in this system the country was divided up into districts. Each district was required to provide one ship of a standard design with 40 oars and the men to row it. Men would have to show up with the required standard set of armament and supplies for a trip.

Each district was divided up into small localities with each area required to provide one warrior, his equipment, and supplies.

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Viking Era

More background on ships

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Comments from a few other books fit well with the previous post Background on Viking Age – ships for warfare, travel, and cargo – 4 of 5

Vikings: Raiders, Traders, and Masters of the Sea by Rodney Castleden, provides more explanations of ship types, starting on page 111.

When thinking of Vikings crossing the sea, we tend to think of them using those famed longships. Those were used on raids because they were so fast and with their shallow draft could beach on the shore or go far upstream.

Model of a knarr in the Hedeby Viking Museum in Germany. “Modell Knorr” by Europabild (no link to author provided) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

For long distance travel, Vikings would use a knarr, also called a hafskip. A knarr used a sail for power with the few oars being for maneuvering. A longship had both sail and many oars. A longship had low free board and a knarr or hafskip had high free board. Free board is the distance between the deck of a ship and the waterline.

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Viking Era

Background on Viking Age – ships for warfare, travel, and cargo – 4 of 5

“Model of the Gokstad ship” by Softeis is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5

A number of Viking ships, or parts thereof, have been recovered by archaeologists. Those few ships reveal much of ship construction.   Viking Age: Everyday life during the extraordinary era of the Norsemen, by Kirsten Wolf, provides some background on ships of the era.

This post has five illustrations of Viking ships.

Ship construction – warships

Estimates are to build a Viking ship of average size of about 65 or 82 feet in length would require 11 trees 3 feet in diameter and 16 feet long along with another very tall tree in the range of 50 to 59 feet, which would be used for the keel.

In the Viking Age, if you saw this from shore, you were about to have the worst day of your life. Courtesy of Adobe Stock.

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