The Gislinge Boat is finished, and it’s now easier to understand the function and purpose to which the boat was built ca. 900 years ago. The Gislinge Boat has a slightly special size – it’s neither fish nor fowl: a little too large, well built and elegant to have simply been a working boat and a little too worn, badly maintained and small to have been a chieftain’s mode of transport. Perhaps it was a little of both, but we just don’t know.
The boat resembles a relatively small Viking boat, with the characteristic overlapping planks and the fine stepped-stems that we recognise from the Vikings’ ocean-going trading ships and their impressive longships. The boat is built based on the same principles, with the same tools and, what’s most noteworthy, the same focus on quality. It’s made from the best materials: built from oak with ca. 300 hand-forged rivets and roves of iron. The Gislinge Boat just hasn’t had as much to do with long trading voyages over the North Atlantic or large-scale attempts at invading England. The Gislinge Boat can best be compared with an ox cart, a workhorse, a Ferguson 31 or maybe a Toyota Hilux. It’s built to bare and carry, for fishing, and transport to and from what was presumably a relatively well-off farm near the small village of Gislinge on the banks of the Lammefjord.
It’s possible that the man who owned the boat was not the same man who sailed in and fished from it every day. Around the middle of the 1100’s, Sjælland was dominated by some few dynasties, which owned the majority of the land. Hvideslægten (the White Dynasty), to whom the later king Valdemar the Great had close connections, owned around 1,500 farms on Sjælland during the Gislinge Boat’s time. They were especially well represented in western Sjælland. This system of ownership can perhaps go some way to explaining how a farm can have had the resources to acquire a boat as well built and relatively large as the Gislinge Boat.
This is no average workboat. At this point in the early Middle Ages, the most common type of vessel on Denmark’s inland waterways were expanded log boats, which had a length of up to 5m. Made from hollowed out tree trunks and braced with transverse frames, the addition of an extra plank in each side raised the height of the boat, making it more seaworthy giving it an increased cargo capacity. Expanded logboats constitute 70% of all boat finds from this era. That type is boat is propelled using oars. Not everybody therefore had the resources to make a 7.7m long clinker built boat, with three pairs of oars and a square sail 10m2 in size. The Gislinge Boat is so finely built with so many details and of such a high quality, that it seems more likely to have been built at a professional boatyard.
A product of the Lammefjord
There’s not much visible today to suggest where the name of the village of Gislinge originated. However, 150 years ago, Gislinge lay on the southern side of the Lammefjord in northern Sjælland. It had already been settled by the Viking Age. The ‘inge’ ending indicates that the settlement may have already been established during the Iron Age. The first part of the placename most likely has its origins in the old word ‘gisel’, which means stave – in this instance, stave in a geographical context, as in a branch, peninsula or headland extending out into the water. The Lammefjord extended much further in land at this time. Odsherred, north of the fjord, was connected to the rest of Sjælland by a small peninsula, which was just 1.5km wide at the narrowest point at Vindekilde. During the second half of the 1800s, the reclamation of the Lammefjord had begun. This was done to increase the available agricultural land after the loss of one third of Denmark’s farmlands after the defeat in the war of 1864.
Before the reclamation of the Lammefjord, it was an extremely shallow fjord, just 7 – 8m meters at the deepest point. For centuries, the fjord has been a popular area to settle, where fishing in the calm waters was the mainstay of the diet of the people living around the fjord. A boat like the Gislinge Boat, with its shallow draft of just 25-30cm would have been the perfect boat for navigating the shallow waters. The boat could hold up to one tonne, or ca. four men and ten sheep, plus gear. With its relatively high cargo capacity, it would have transported considerable amounts of goods around the inner straits and delivered grain, wool, dried fish and meat, lime bast rope, furs and all the other products that were made on farms 900 years ago.
Not a bed of roses…
The Gislinge Boat’s era was violent and unstable. The boat was most likely built around 1130 at the end of a relatively peaceful period in Danish medieval history, during the reign of King Niels (1104 – 1134). One year later, Erik Elegod’s son, Knud Lavard, was murdered in Haraldsted and his murder marked the beginning of a twenty-five year period of near civil war in Denmark. Along the coasts, the Vendish clans of Northern Germany took advantage of the weakened royal power to rob and plunder the population. On Lolland, they even established settlements, which can be seen in the placename ending ‘itze’, for example, Kramnitze. However, the inner fjords of Sjælland, including the Lammefjord, remained relatively safe, perhaps due to the narrow entry into the fjord between Hundested and Rørvig.
The shallow straits also made navigation difficult for larger ships without local knowledge. Still, settlements patterns indicate that most settlements from that time were often located at a good distance away from the water, even up to 1km away, as was also the case around the Lammefjord. The Vendels continued to be a threat to safety along the Danish coasts until Valdemar the Great emerges victorious from the contest for the crown with Svend Grathe and Knud 5th in 1157. Valdemar quickly proves to be a clever king and manages to unite the kingdom. As early as 1159, he had managed to gather the levy fleet to sail against the Vendels. The raids continue in the proceeding years and culminate with the capture of the fort at Arkona on Rügen in 1169.
While all this is going on, the Gislinge Boat still sails steadily for its owner, normally used for both fishing and transport of people and cargo. The boat was, as mentioned above, equipped with three pairs of oars and a square sail, which made it a very flexible mode of transport. At a time where travel over land was slow, cumbersome and not without risks, small boats like the Gislinge Boat would have been essential to life along the coasts.
Christianity = fish
During the 12th century, fishing would mainly have been a seasonal activity, intended to supplement the other food resources available on a farm. Fishing tools and methods hadn’t changed greatly over the centuries. The majority of fishing in the inner fjord systems was done using nets, hooks and fishing spears. Common for all three methods is the fact that they can often be carried out from a small, expanded logboat. So why suddenly order a much larger, well built boat to fulfil a function that had been carried out since the Stone Age using much simpler, and of course, cheaper technology?
The transition from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages was a time of unrest and upheaval in many ways and the rise of Christianity had wide-ranging consequences for daily life. Until that point, the population in and around Denmark ate fish as a way of supplementing their diet, which largely consisted of cereal grains, vegetables and meat, and which was largely dependent on the seasons. Around May – June, the harvest stores were just about used up and the arrival of the spring fishing season was a welcome one. With the advent of Christianity, the Catholic rules concerning Lent, which at that time included the 40 days up to Easter, as well as the tradition of fasting each Friday throughout the year. After the introduction of Christianity, demand for fish rises dramatically. At the same time, the salt trade from Germany began to make it possible to salt fish, especially herring, for selling on to the central European market. Perhaps the man who commissioned the building of the Gislinge Boat was the medieval equivalent of a ‘first mover’, who saw the growing market and invested heavily in it. If this was the case, we can assume that the boat didn’t disappoint.
The extent of the wear and tear on the Gislinge Boat reflects many years hard use on the fjord. Cracks in the hull were patched repeatedly using small pieces of beech. Dating of the repairs suggests that the boat had been in use for ca. 50 years, perhaps even more. So it wasn’t the boat’s original owner who lost the boat, but perhaps one of his grandchildren who lost the boat after it had been in the family for three generations.
Quiet testimony
The finding of the Gislinge Boat reveals a very important aspect of the time. The vessels we know the most about from the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages are not the average vessels of the time. Longships and large trading vessels are strongly over-represented in research and in popular understanding. From childhood, we learn about raids and voyages of discovery, but are very rarely presented with something so commonplace and everyday as a worn out, old fishing boat. Although kings, earls and bishops dominate our understanding of the period, the Gislinge Boat bears quiet testimony to a world peopled with ordinary men and women: people who had to work to survive and who, through their endeavours, established the foundations for expanding trade, voyages of conquest, crusades, economic growth, closer connections with the south and a Europe that was rapidly evolving.