in Viking Age shipbuilding and perhaps a testimony that longships of this size started
to reach the borders of what the shipwright could achieve. Roskilde 6 dates dendro-
chronologically to after 1025 , and may be from the time of Canute the Great who, in the
later – and exaggerating – saga literature, is said to have had a ship of 120 oars (Snorri’s
Heimskringla: 417 )!
Longships were also smaller than this. Skuldelev 5 , with a length of 18. 3 m and only
twenty-six oars, probably just deserved this title, as did vessels nos 3 and 5 of the five
vessels from the mid-eleventh-century blockade at Foteviken on the east coast of Scania
(Crumlin-Pedersen 1994 ; Crumlin-Pedersen et al. 2002 ). (Figure 11. 3 .)
The cargo shipsThe most important development in shipbuilding in the late Viking Age was, however,
the introduction of specialised cargo vessels. What marked out these was that they could
be sailed by a small crew, that they had a large loading capacity per crewmember and
that they were dependent on the sail for propulsion. They could have a few oars for
manoeuvring purposes, but these would under normal circumstances not be used
for moving the ship longer distances.
The oldest example of a Viking cargo ship in the archaeological record is the Klåstad
ship. It was built in the closing years of the tenth century and wrecked near Kaupang,
Norway, with a cargo partly consisting of hone stones. It had an estimated cargo
capacity of c. 13 tons, and a length of c. 21 m (Crumlin-Pedersen 1999 , also reports on
the ship from Äskekärr).
Around ad 1000 , the Äskekärr ship found in the Göta River, close to Gothenburg,
shows a much more efficient hull shape, with a cargo capacity of c. 20 tons in an only
15. 8 m long vessel. A few decades later, around 1025 , shipbuilders around Hedeby
produced much larger vessels, as the 25 m long Hedeby 3 ship shows. Calculations
indicate that it could carry c. 60 tons.
The Skuldelev 1 find is a Norwegian-built, sea-going cargo ship from c. 1030. It is
16. 3 m long and has a cargo capacity of 24 tons. Sailing experiments with several full-
scale reconstructions of this vessel have shown that a crew size of five to seven is
appropriate. Similar experiments with reconstructions of the much smaller Skuldelev 3 ,
which carries only 4. 6 tons, show that it needs a crew of four to five (Andersen et al.
1997 : 267 ). Thus the general rule in seafaring that efficiency in tons cargo per crew-
member increases with size also seems to fit on Viking cargo ships.
There were probably two factors that stimulated development of specialised cargo
carriers in Viking Age Scandinavia. One was increasing volume of trade and exchange,
and increasing stratification of society, which led to the need for more and more com-
modities being transported at as low a cost as possible. Another one was the expansion
into the Atlantic and keeping contacts with the North Atlantic settlements. This
required seaworthy vessels with the capacity to transport people, horses and cattle, tools
and supplies.
It is likely that specialised cargo ships started to be built earlier than reflected in the
archaeological record. Cargo ships were clearly not used as grave ships, which is the only
type of find that we have from before the late tenth century. Specialised cargo carriers
are known from other parts of northern Europe, and Rimbert, in his Vita Anskarii
(c. 870 ), several times mentions the presence of ‘merchants’ ships’ in Hedeby in the
–– Jan Bill ––