Saxon

Registered Charity No. 293097

Below is a taster of the type of article which is printed in the magazine.

Whilst the Sutton Hoo cemetery is famous for its spectacular high status small finds it is also crucially important for the two burial ship impressions or ‘ghost ships’.

The site sheds considerable light on early ships and how some were built. Specialists in the field of boat archaeology might simply term them forms of ‘keel’ type vessels - meaning they had hulls pointed at both ends which were made of planks that partially overlapped. The planks had been assembled as a hull shell before the frame timbers were inserted. The overlaps in this case were held together with a form of iron rivet or ‘rove nail’. Fortunately for Basil Brown and company, these nails survived as rusty concretions in lines in the sandy soil. If the ships laps had been fastened the way many other Anglo-Saxon ships were, only with wooden fastenings, then the ship impressions might never have been recognised at all!

Whilst the National Trust exhibition at Sutton Hoo and publications provide archaeologists with a lot of ‘meat’ for the understanding of early ship building techniques, there are significant gaps in the evidence which could do with more targeted research. These are due to the poor preservation of the actual timbers of the ships.

Perhaps the most important constructional detail still uncertain is how the planks were made. Other finds, such as the earlier Nydam 1 ship, had all their planks made by axe trimming half a log to shape, whilst other ships such as the later Graveney Boat had all of their surviving planks made by radially splitting large, high quality logs. This issue is not just ‘academic’. If a full-size replica Sutton Hoo ship were to be built as an authentic copy, the cost implications of one method against another would be huge. I suspect the wood grain preserved in some of the Sutton Hoo ship nail corrosion masses might just still hold the answer to this question.

It should be noted that the term treewrighting was used for all large scale woodworking in Anglo-Saxon times, and the techniques and tools used for work ‘on land’ and for use on the water were very similar. For example, distinctive Anglo-Saxon ship nails were used in high status buildings as well as ships, as were grown timbers. In later medieval times the crafts of ‘shipwright’ and ‘carpenter’ became quite distinct.

It will be known to all newsletter regulars that pot sherds are essential basic finds of most archaeological work. If we had to rely only on finding virtually complete pots to date and understand sites we would really be stuck. The same is true of boat and ship archaeology; fragmentary finds massively outnumber relatively complete wreck or burial ship finds, particularly in England. Ships and boats were often broken up for secondhand timber in the Anglo-Saxon period. When the re-use occurs in a wet location, those remains often survive very well; for example, all the marks left by the woodworker’s or ‘treewright’s’ broad axe may still survive. In the last few years, we have learned a great deal about the details of various types and periods of ship and boat building as a result of the ‘forensic’ study of such traces - but that is another long and complicated story! Here we will concentrate on basic key features visible to all. For example, it has become apparent that some ship builders in the Anglo-Saxon period used particular types of fastening or waterproofing materials, whilst others used quite different fastenings or sealants for the same purpose.

Unfortunately these remains are massively skewed towards the late Anglo-Saxon period c. 800 to 1070 AD. The most complete Anglo-Saxon boat find of all is the small trading vessel of the 10th century - the ‘Graveney boat’ found near Faversham in north Kent in 1970 (and with a lot of luck the surviving remains may eventually be displayed there as a local initiative has started with that aim) For more information see ‘The Graveney Boat’

(V. Fenwick 1978, BAR , Brit Ser. 53). This vessel had many similarities with the two Sutton Hoo ships, although it was proportionately a little wider and heavier. The detailed study of its remains has been followed by intensive study of numerous fragments of planked ships and larger boats excavated from the 1970s to mid 1990s , very largely in London. Considerable advances in the recording and dating of the treewright’s work have been made over the last two decades involving the use of targeted experimental archaeology, and tree-ring dating in particular. It should be noted that successful tree-ring dating can often also suggest a regional origin for the timber.

It has gradually become apparent that some details of ship construction at this time were distinctive to particular regions around the North Sea and Channel. However, it also appears that most craft had some common features and that there were many shared characteristics. For example, in most traditions, hull sides were made of over-lapping planks which were assembled before the framing was inserted.

For brevity I have listed below the key features which distinguish at least three main styles of planked ship building:

A CHECK-LIST OF THE CURRENTLY KNOWN SHIPBUILDING DETAILS OF THE VARIED TRADITIONS OF PLANKED VESSEL CONSTRUCTION LIKELY TO BE SEEN IN THE CHANNEL AND NORTH SEA IN THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD

Key features of Anglo-Saxon planked construction

1. Vessels were built around a central back bone timber or keel, with overlapping ‘clinker’ planking erected as a shell before the framing. A form of ‘keel-type’ construction.

2. The framing was heavy and seems to have been inserted after planking up the whole hull, using few cross beams.

3. The keel timbers were plank-like or shallow beams.

4. The vessels’ ends could be straight and sloping, or convexly curved.

5. Currently we have no evidence of decoration of Anglo-Saxon ships timbers.

Two schools appear to exist within Anglo-Saxon planked boat construction and have been named after the sites where they were first found;

 The New Fresh Wharf School- where the plank laps were fastened only with treenails and the sealant (‘luting’) was tarred moss.

 The Graveney School where the laps were fastened with small iron rove nails were driven through small wooden rawl plugs. Here the luting was tarred animal fibre rolls.

1. Vessels were clinker keels, but perhaps a little sharper and more lightly framed than Anglo-Saxon keels, they also used multiple cross beams called ‘bitr’, and framing was added after the lower hull was built and then on completion, rather than in one go.

2. The laps of the craft were fastened with large iron rove nails without rawl plugs and luted with cords of tarred animal hair.

3. Decoration in the form of mouldings was common and for very high status craft complex carvings were sometimes used.

4. Stem timbers were convexly curved.

1. Larger vessels built in the Low Countries seem to have been very distinctive at this time, and currently the finds show that they had huge expanded dugout bottoms, with sides planked in a form of the clinker method. The framing was inserted later and was heavy. The term ‘hulc’ (= hollowed out) seems to have been applied to ships of this type in England and fragments of one from the low countries were found in London in 1990. They also appear to be depicted on at least one type of East Anglian coin.

2. The laps of the overlapping side planking were sealed in a very distinctive way; tarred moss was set in the lap before fastening and then moss was also driven into a gap left at the top edge of the lap and capped with a lath held in place by small iron staples known as ‘sintels’.

3. The lap fastenings were treenails as in the New Fresh Wharf style of Anglo- Saxon ship building.

Very recently French archaeologists have discovered the remains of a small capsized planked vessel that dates to the early medieval period but is not built with over lapping planking like the vessels built round the North Sea. The vessel from the Charente estuary (the Porte Berteau II wreck) has planking set edge to edge in some form of the ‘carvel’ style. The large iron nails used are rather like those of Romano-Celtic craft, as is the edge to edge hull planking. Whether Romano-British boat builders working in the early Saxon period continued with a related form of planked vessel construction is as yet unknown, but it seems likely. Planking laid edge to edge, usually on pre-erected framing, was not widely used until the 16th century AD in England. It is quite possible that vessels built in this style came to southern England before the Conquest, as the tree-ring dates indicate construction in 599-600, AD at roughly the same time as the larger Sutton Hoo ship.

A small number of shallow, flat-bottomed river craft with square ends have been found on large continental rivers or estuaries, but as yet we have no trace of such vessels in this period in Britain.

It has also been possible to investigate the remains of Anglo-Saxon small boats which so far, have proved to be locally varied forms of dugout boat, generally between c. 2.5- 4.5m long. The vast majority of dugout boat finds in British museums date from the early medieval period, rather than prehistory as most might expect. These craft generally do not seem to have received as much attention as the more glamorous and larger planked vessels, but they can provide a great deal of information about how ordinary, historically unrecorded, folk used the water and developed their woodworking skills. They vary greatly from area to area and from relatively crude trough-like craft to thinly and beautifully carved, relatively light ‘expanded’ dugout boats such as those found in the Snape cemetery and recently in Lincoln Museum archives. Anywhere in NW Europe in the early medieval period, one would have expected to see locally distinctive, small dugout boats being paddled and poled around much larger plank built boats and ships.

Note (ed): see SAXON issue 39 (2003) for report on The Covehithe Log Boat

Really we have to admit that we could do with more planked vessel finds from England, particularly from the early Anglo-Saxon period, to fill out a rather scant picture. But enough material has been found to isolate the key regional styles of construction and bring us closer to understanding what was meant by the account in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle of King Alfred: “ordering the building of warships neither after the ‘Frisian’ nor ‘Danish’ pattern.”