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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Viking Era

Background on Viking Age – Limits of our knowledge – 3 of 5

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Viking Age: Everyday life during the extraordinary era of the Norsemen, by Kirsten Wolf, does a good job of explaining the limits in our knowledge of the Viking Age. Author points out we “know next to nothing” about the training and education used by Scandinavians. Author guesses that homeschooling was used extensively but there is no trace of that visible in any way.

The limit in knowledge carries over to health and medicine. (more…)

Viking Era

More background on coins and storing wealth in hoards during Viking Age

Replica of Viking coin. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Comments I’ve accumulated from a few other books fit well with the previous post Background on Viking Age – money, trading centers – 2 of 5

In Vikings: Raiders, Traders, and Masters of the Sea on page 99, Rodney Castleden explains much of the trade carried out by Vikings was in barter. For example, swapping furs for linen or pottery.

Eventually bullion became a store of value. This would have been in the form of silver coins usually, with gold being used sometimes. The coins had value because their precious metal not because of the particular coin.

This is a different framework from today where coins and bills have value because the government says so. It would be extremely rare to encounter a coin today that has precious metal equal to its face value. To further the contrast if you happen to have an old coin that has lots of silver in it (that would be dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars dated 1964 and earlier in the United States) their value is a large multiple of the face value. If those coins happen to be in fairly good condition their value is an extreme multiple of their face value.

The contrast in the Viking Age and medieval era is coins had value because of the precious metal they contained. Thus the bullion value was the means of exchange. As an aside is also a store of value and a unit of measure. That is the definition of money.

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Viking Era

Background on Viking Age – money, trading centers – 2 of 5

“The Cuerdale hoard” by akhenatenator is in the public domain (CC0 1.0)

In terms of economic life, Viking Age: Everyday life during the extraordinary era of the Norsemen, by Kirsten Wolf, points out geography affected the size of settlements. On the coasts of Denmark and Sweden there were villages, meaning a group of three or more farms. In contrast, across most of Norway, the interior of Sweden, and the island colonies, the typical settlements were individual farms.

Fish were obviously a major component of the diet, particularly since there were a lot of fish and they were close in to land.

Author points out blacksmiths, who made tools and implements, had high prestige and had some of the richest grave goods.

Imports and exports

Author thinks that fur was one of the main exports. Slaves captured on raids were another major export.

Major imports would have been salt, spices, wine, silk, pottery, and glass. Weapons and semi precious stones would have been other major imports. Silver flowed into Scandinavia as the result of both trading and raiding.

Author says the pottery, wool cloth, and glass would have been imported from Western Europe. Silk came from Byzantium. Much of the silver came from the Muslim world.

Coin hoards

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Viking Era

Background on Viking Age – life expectancy, family structure, and stray tidbits – 1 of 5

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

Viking Age: Everyday life during the extraordinary era of the Norsemen, by Kirsten Wolf, provides a good overview of the Viking Age. The seven chapters discuss domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, and religious life. I will paraphrase only a few of the author’s comments of particular interest to me.

Life expectancy, family structure, rights of women

Average life expectancy was something in the range of 30 years to 40 years. This means only a few people lived long enough to become a grandparent.

Author points out women had far more rights in Scandinavia during the Viking Age than typical for the medieval era. They could divorce and had inheritance rights.

Combine this with men being gone for a long time on raids or trading expeditions and one of the consequences is that marriage was more of an economic partnership than a patriarchal system. When men were gone for an extended period of time, the wife would have to tend to all aspects of running the homestead.

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Viking Era

Estimate of price of silver and gold in Viking Age

In Viking Age, 1 ounce of gold was equal to 8 ounces of silver. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
In Viking Age, 4 cows were worth about 8 ounces of silver. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
In Viking Age, 24 sheep were worth about 8 ounces of silver. Okay, okay, I count about 31 sheep in the photo, but you get the idea. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

To give you a rough picture of relative values during the Viking Age, the items in each of the above photos would have approximately equal value:

8 ounces of silver = 1 ounce of gold = 4 cows = 24 sheep

This post calculates my estimate of the price of gold and silver during the Viking Age. The point estimates from my long string of assumptions are:

  • $550 for an ounce of silver
  • $4,400 for an ounce of gold

Some comparisons of relative values of precious metals and products are discussed in Units of measure and relative value in the Viking Age.

To develop an estimate of precious metal prices, I’ll use the data from Hurstwic. They are a group that provides training on Viking combat techniques.

They provide some estimates of relative value and provide multiple data points that can be cross referenced.  I’ll keep my eye open for other reference points.

Here is what they provide on their page, Towns and Trading in the Viking Age. Yet another shaky simplifying assumption is that this analysis assumes data from Iceland early in the 11th century is somewhat representative of relative values across the Viking age. Here are their estimates:

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comparison of living standards

Increase of income per person over last 200 years

(Article cross-posted from Outrun Change because it shows the radical change in per capita income over the last 200 years, which in turn illustrates the challenge of expressing ancient prices and incomes in terms of today.)

Here is an approximation of annual per capita GDP from 1 AD through 1913:

I’ve long been amazed at the radical growth in per capita wealth over the last 200 years. That means since the Industrial Revolution.

Living in dirt-eating poverty as the normal way of life for essentially every person on the planet changed about 200 years ago, give or take.

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Middle Ages

Prices in late Middle Ages

Armour of the medieval knight. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

While browsing the ‘net looking for indicators of prices in the Viking Age, I came across a treasure trove of prices for the late Middle Ages. Range of age is from the middle 1300s to the  middle 1500s, with most of the prices in the 1300s, it seems. Items listed are clothing, work tools, food, weapons, and armor. A large number of data points for wages are listed.

As a topic for further analysis, there is more than enough data to compare wages across various skill sets for relative pay. There is also enough data to calculate costs in terms of hours of labor in order to impute current prices.

The data is attributed to Kenneth Hodges at Berkeley.

The listing can be found at two places:

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