Ancient Finances

Previous post accumulated many detail data points of what time would be involved in constructing a medium-size Viking longship.

This post continues the discussion and accumulates the time estimates.

Wild guesses to fill in the blanks

The Price text does not make any guesses on the time to cook the tar to seal the ship, the tar or animal oil needed to protect the sails so they can catch the wind, weave the rope and sundry cordage needed, manufacture the sea-chests, weave the rugs taken along or weave and weather-proof a tent to cover the center area of the ship, or manufacture 32 oars plus several spare.

Off the top of my head I don’t recall having seen any estimates for those elsewhere.

So, to get some sort of a workable estimate to put one medium-sized longship to sea, I will pull some estimates out of thin air. These are also called WAGs, or, um, wildly aimed guesses.

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For a dive into how much time it would take to construct a Viking ship, weave the mainsail along with a spare, and manufacturer the seagoing outfits for a full crew, we can take a look at information provided by Neil Price in his delightful book Children of Ash and Elm / A history of the Vikings. Will have more to say about the book.

I will list the detail components he describes, accumulating the various time estimates. Then I’ll tabulate the amounts. Final step will be to combine the amounts to get some estimates expressed in terms of full-time people-years of labor as well as converting the estimates to people-hours. That will allow us to look at the time involved if a rich yarl or sea-king wanted to hire all the people to build a boat or if a large community wanted to do it using the spare time available in a larger area.

Surplus production

Surplus production is a phrase I’ll bring into the discussion later. This is the amount of extra time a person has available after taking care of the needs for subsistence living. In other words how much time is left over after tending the farm and other chores to keep her family fed and clothed.

One estimate of this, which I have mentioned before, can be found from Philip Line in his book The Vikings and Their Enemies – Warfare in Northern Europe, 750 -1100. A key comment he made on page 51, which I will quote, said:

“Experimental archaeologists have estimated that 40,000 working hours may have been needed to produce all the components of a 30-meter longship, consuming the surplus production of 100 persons for a year.”

The value in this comment is the estimate one person had 400 surplus hours per year. That averages about 10 hours per week and probably is far higher in the winter months and lower during planting and harvest time. Since building a boat would be a long-term project I will go with the average of 400 hours per year surplus labor.

Time estimates from Price

First, time for the ship itself.

Text points out the Skuldelev 2 worship has been painstakingly reconstructed using traditional techniques. From that work text reports it was estimated to take 2,650 person-days to build a boat and another 13,500 hours ironwork to manufacture the rivets and all the other necessary fittings going into the ship.

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