beyond the horizon. Changes in the colour and taste of the water may tell when
the currents changed. The sun, the moon, the stars, and the knowledge by heart of the
common patterns of changing wind and wave directions would help one to stay on
course. And sailors developed, as it happens for many today, an intuitive ability to
estimate the speed and ground covered by their vessels.
Such a navigation based on experience is embedded in the mind of individuals,
and this is also true for coastal navigation, which made up the larger part of Viking
voyaging. Memorised characteristics of coasts and waters, helped along by descriptive
toponyms, were essential navigation aids, and pilots with local knowledge were always
valuable. This cognitive character of early medieval navigation must have benefited the
Scandinavians compared with the people in other, less sea-oriented regions and been
part of the background for their maritime success.
AFTER THE VIKING AGEThe most obvious change in the ship archaeological record by the end of the Viking Age
is that longships disappear. Historically we know them to have played an important role
well into the twelfth century, and their vanishing among the archaeological finds may
be due to coincidence as well as real changes. What also happened, however, is that cargo
vessels partly took over their role. Being higher and more strongly built, they were an
adequate answer to more powerful missile weapons like the crossbow and heavier
armour. As the much higher and more heavily built cog appeared in the twelfth century,
it soon became the preferred warship, as often used against the now numerous coastal
cities as against other ships (Bill 2002 ).
The clinker-built cargo ships continued to be used, and changed initially only slowly
away from the design that they had achieved in the late Viking Age. The spacing
between the frames shrank, and the lowermost beams almost became one with the
floor timbers. From the late twelfth century change speeds up. The framing becomes
simpler and more efficient for high-sided vessels, and the side rudder is replaced by the
stern rudder. Decorations, which were everywhere in the Viking Age ships, gradually
disappear, and handicraft becomes more economical. During the thirteenth century the
changes become so extensive that shipbuilding in southern Scandinavia more or less
loses its distinctive character and becomes part of a general, north European lap-strake
tradition. Only in the northern parts of Scandinavia did traditional building style persist
and led, in the nineteenth century, to the ‘discovery’ of Viking Age shipbuilding as a
living tradition.
BIBLIOGRAPHYAndersen, E. et al. ( 1997 ) Roar Ege. Skuldelev 3 skibet som arkæologisk eksperiment, Roskilde:
Vikingeskibshallen.
Bill, J. ( 1997 ) ‘Ships and seamanship’, in P. Sawyer (ed.) Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——( 2002 ) ‘Scandinavian warships and naval power in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’,
in J.B. Hattendorf and R.W. Unger (eds) War at Sea in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
(Warfare in History), Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press.
Bill, J. et al. ( 1997 ) Dansk søfarts historie, vol. 1 : Indtil 1588. Fra stammebåd til skib, Copenhagen:
Gyldendal.
–– chapter 11 : Viking ships and the sea––