was thought that Ulfberht was a Frankish swordsmith, working somewhere in
the region of the Lower Rhine, but a recent study suggests that Ulfberht was
more probably the name of an abbot or bishop who oversaw an arms
manufactory. The swords were regarded as good quality weapons, so much so
that copies with forged signatures also appeared. There are around 166 known
Ulfberht blades, but only sixteen of these come from the lands of the Franks.
At least 144 of them, in contrast, have been found on foreign sites, particularly
in Norway. Did the swords travel as booty, or in ransom payments–or as
contraband?
One Ulfberht sword has been found in a grave at Hedeby in 1906. The body
had been laid in a wooden coffin, but only the iron nails remained to show its
shape. Inside, with the bones, was the sword in its scabbard on the right side,
and a knife on the pelvis, possibly originally attached to a belt. The grave can
be dated, by the shape of the sword hilt, to between 900 and 950. The
inscription of the blade could only be seen through an Xray scan, as it is
obscured by the remains of the scabbard, and then only a possible‘B’and a
more definite‘RH’could be identified. So some mysteries are unanswered–
was the dead person a legitimate traveller from the Frankish lands carrying his
own, legally acquired, sword? Was he a raider who gained the sword in booty
stolen from the Franks? Or did he buy the sword as contraband in Hedeby?^11
A graveyard in the Swedish town of Birka has also produced some
evidence of crime. The Hemladen mound cemetery contained the grave of a
woman otherwise intact, with brooches dating it to between 850 and 975. The
skull in this undisturbed grave was found lying by the body’s arm. Was she
executed for a crime? But then why was she buried with her jewellery,
including a string of pearls, her knife and sewing kit, an antler spoon and
some wooden vessels? Bizarrely, a pig jaw had been placed where her head
should have been. Was she suspected of being a witch? Perhaps her head was
cut off after her death to stop her spirit haunting the living.
Another grave, containing a person in a strangely bent position and with the
head removed, was found under a terrace that had once held a longhouse. This
was a double male grave dating from the late eighth century. One of the men
was buried with a spear, a shield, a set of arrows and an unworked elk antler.
Was the person whose head had been removed a slave, killed to accompany his
master to the afterlife, like the examples considered earlier in this chapter? In
Viking thought of the time, a slave would have been just another personal
chattel, to be disposed of in the same way as his other possessions.
In 1996 an early eighthcentury burial mound was excavated; several
bodies were found and it has been suggested that this was the grave of the
DARK AGE CRIMES