Weapons and Tactics

Weapons of the Vikings

The Vikings used weapons in much the same way as other contemporary armies, and their use grew more sophisticated as the Viking Age progressed. When a group of Vikings in 845 faced the regular Frankish army, they appeared to an observer ‘unequipped and almost unarmed, and very few'.

The monk who reported this wrote with the polemical purpose of criticising what he saw as the cowardice of the regular army (a common theme in contemporary Frankish writings), but it is hard to escape the point that the Vikings, comparatively, were poorly provided with arms and armour, while the Franks in contrast, helmeted and protected by chain mail, carried shields and spears.^{^[145]} Among the weapons that the Vikings used were axes, swords, spears and arrows. They also had shields and armour.^{^[146]}

Viking Tactics

The Vikings were often, although far from always, successful in their violent enterprises. Much of their success depended on their ability to surprise their victims, as the chronicler Prudentius expressed it in 837: ‘The Northmen... fell on Frisia with their usual surprise attack.'^{^[147]} The Vikings typically arrived by sea in their fast ships, allowing them to attack with very little advance warning, as distinct from the slow-moving land-based armies of the early medieval European kingdoms. The Viking ship is thus to be considered one of their most important military technologies. The Viking Age could not have started before some Scandinavian shipwright, probably in the late eight century, worked out how to attach a mast and a sail securely to the sturdy clinker-built war canoes that had long been in use. He created the Viking longship: narrow, sturdy, fast and ocean going. Modern reconstructions of excavated ships have proven eminently seaworthy. The Vikings were aware of how much they had to thank their ships for, so the ship played an important role in their imagination and mythology.^{^[148]}

Another feature of Viking tactics was to attack soft, undefended targets. Early on, the Vikings favoured monasteries and churches with their poorly defended treasures, but they also took advantage of whatever they were able to find out about the troop movements of their opponents. A band of Vikings, for example, attacked the city of Nantes in 845, which was undefended because only a month earlier the Bretons had soundly defeated the local Frankish army. They also attacked on an important religious festival, St John's Day (24 June), when many people had gathered in the city wearing their Sunday best.¹¹

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

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