Dark Age Naval Power

The c320AD war vessel - sail-less, originally too - found in Nydam bog, Denmark, one of the handful only of high-calibre finds which strongly swayed our preconception of pre-Viking navies. Photo credit: Erik Christensen.

John Haywood’s seminal thesis Dark Age Naval Power¹ pioneered a vigorous attack on the notion of Barbaricum² seapower as only rudimentary. Deliberately disdaining archeological finds as skewed by their small number, & building instead on a thorough - if often generous - interpretation of every conceivably relevant contemporary written, iconographic, & numismatic source, it asserts that early Franks & Saxons attained "almost Viking-like" naval capacity, & most plausibly did use sails, even without strong keels.

Still. So much has happened since 1991 - in that very maritime archeology corpus the author so explicitly disregards - & I now wish I’d acquired the somewhat later, yet far harder to obtain, revised 2nd edition instead.³

I’ve slightly more to say on the topic - via a recent discovery which may indirectly bear on the whole discussion - in: Has Viking Age Been Pushed Back One Century?

1 The first edition remains far the easiest to obtain anywhere: Haywood, John. Dark Age Naval Power: A Reassessment of Frankish & Anglo-Saxon Seafaring Activity. London: Routledge, 1991.

2 Barbaricum is what Romans called the region immediately North of their empire’s border. Roughly equivalent to modern Netherlands + Germany + Denmark + Poland.

3 At erratic intervals, a used - quite pricey - 2nd edition seems again to become available at a given seller, for anyone quick to grab it. So far still haven't seen one shipping to my own country: Haywood, John. Dark Age Naval Power: A Reassessment of Frankish & Anglo-Saxon Seafaring Activity. Norfolk, UK: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2006.