How much bread and meat did the Vikings need?
There are many different screen adaptations now that try to show how things really were. Sometimes quite successfully, but the economy is almost always forgotten.
Here is a topic that would ruin the lives of many professional historians - supply fleets Viking Age. This question became the starting point for my research and allowed me to write in the book “The Varangians Against the Christian World. The Real story "Scandinavian Vikings" will revolutionize our understanding of the Vikings, their lives, goals and historical contributions.
Supply of fleets, that is, ships and their crews. What could be so interesting here? I was interested in the question of how big was the mountain of grain that had to be prepared for the sea voyage?
How much bread should a sailor take per day?
Since the ship's rations in the era of the sailing and rowing fleet, which included the Scandinavian drakkars, consisted mainly of grain products, preparation for a sea voyage necessarily included a grain procurement campaign. The only question is how much.
My method, taken from the arsenal of early Soviet planning, I call the "key method." We need to somehow find out how much food the Vikings took on board. But the Vikings were not so kind as to leave us books of ship supplies. Probably, some inventories of supplies were made, but they have not reached us. In the chronicles we know, written by the opponents of the Vikings, there is not a word about this, and professional historians have nothing to say here. A dead end? No hurry.
The "key method" consists of finding a similar but well-documented economic phenomenon from a later time, and then, having checked for comparability, extrapolating the data from the later time to the earlier one. The result, of course, is a very conditional comparison, but it is better than nothing.
I was lucky to find detailed inventories of supplies taken on board by German whaling ships from Hamburg in the early 28th century. Comparability: the same sailing area (whalers sailed to the shores of Greenland), the same length of the voyage - about six months, a similar type of vessel and the same size of the crew - 30-XNUMX people. The physiology of nutrition and hardships at sea also did not change much. The Vikings may not have sailed directly to Greenland, limiting themselves to the Baltic and North Seas, but they had a harder time at sea due to the lack of below-deck rooms and heated cabins.
The provisions of the whaling ship for 28 people included:
13 barrels of crackers,
12 bags of baked bread,
16 bags of barley,
12 bags of grey peas,
12 bags of white peas,
850 pounds of cheese,
400 pounds of lard,
7 barrels of meat,
20 barrels of beer,
2 bags of salt,
Firewood and peat.
If we take the capacity of the barrel as 160 liters, and the capacity of the bag as 80 kg, then we get the following calculation in weight indicators: 830 kg of crackers (the density of crackers is taken as 400 grams per liter), 960 kg of bread, 1280 kg of barley, 1920 kg of peas, 340 kg of cheese, 160 kg of lard, 1200 kg of meat, 3200 kg of beer and 160 kg of salt. Total: 10050 kg, or about 10 tons of supplies excluding the weight of the container.
The inventory indicated the proportion of grain consumed for the production of rusks, and from it it follows that approximately 160 kg of grain, two-thirds rye and one-third wheat were used for a barrel of rusks, so that 13 kg of grain were used to produce 830 barrels or 2080 kg of rusks.
Just to remind you, there are exactly 13 barrels in the top row.
A whaler with 28 people took 180 kg of bread products (which have a grain equivalent when rusks and bread are converted into grain, 4990 kg) for 5394 days at sea, or 0,9 kg per person per day. The Germans also consumed about 0,63 kg of "liquid bread" in the form of beer per person per day.
The Naval Charter, drawn up personally by Peter I, contains a sailor's food ration for a 28-day month: 2 kg of beef, 2 kg of pork, 18 kg of crackers, 4 kg of peas, 6 kg of cereals, 1,6 kg of fish, as well as butter, wine, beer, vinegar and salt. A sailor's daily ration was 1,2 kg, including 1 kg of bread products.
Thus, the bread ration in the sailing and rowing fleets was about 1 kg per person per day. The rest was meat and fats. If meat, fats and fish are replaced by bread products, then we can take the calculated 1,4 kg of bread products per person per day. In my book, I made estimates of the food supply of the Viking fleets using a coefficient of 1,4 kg per person per day, but now we can make a more detailed calculation, taking into account meat products.
100 peasant households per ship
So, we have a ship for 30 people - a typical Viking battle drakkar - taken into account for our calculations. The duration of the voyage is from April to October, six months or 180 days. Such a ship needs to take on board:
According to the standard of 1,4 kg of bread products per person per day - 7560 kg of grain.
According to the norm, 1 kg of bread products and 0,25 kg of meat per day - 5400 kg of bread products and 1350 kg of meat.
If we assume that the bread products included 16% baked bread (864 kg) and 14% crackers (756 kg), then when converted to grain consumption for the production of bread and crackers, the grain equivalent of bread products is 6309 kg. This is significant, since this is the amount of grain that needed to be prepared to supply the ship for the voyage.
In total, 6309 kg of grain and 1350 kg of meat is the amount of food needed to equip one drakkar for 30 people for 180 days of sailing.
A Danish drakkar at sea. It's impressive that you don't immediately realize that something is wrong here. The drakkar is empty, without the cargo of provisions that any ship that goes to sea should have.
And it is not necessary to say that, supposedly, the Vikings sailed on luck and in the hope that they would plunder some monastery. They always took supplies for the entire estimated duration of the campaign, so as to have provisions for the return, regardless of the vicissitudes of military fortune.
By the way, the ship's crew needs food not only at sea, but also on shore. In order for the Vikings not to lose their fighting ability during the months of wintering on shore, they should be fed approximately the same, so another 6,3 tons of grain and 1,35 tons of meat are required for the winter.
In total, one ship for 30 people per year requires 12,6 tons of grain and 2,7 tons of meat.
Now, what follows from this?
12,6 tons of grain is 15,75 cubic meters of volume. A barn capable of holding that much grain is a hut measuring 3 x 3 meters and 2 meters high. You also need a warehouse for meat products, as well as warehouses for food containers and other ship supplies, such as ropes, canvas, resin, and so on. And 30 people need to be accommodated somewhere. The ship's crew must periodically gather in full force, and during this time they must live together for many days or weeks, while, say, preparing to go to sea. You can't do without a shore barracks.
In other words, each ship needed a base point, which included a pier, a slipway for rolling the ship onto land for repairs and tarring, a shore barracks, food storage facilities, warehouses for ship property and supplies, and a workshop. It is quite obvious that property and food that spoil easily must be stored in a specially constructed building. Without the minimum necessary infrastructure of a base point, it is hardly possible to prepare a ship for a long sea voyage.
Further. The grain comes, of course, from the peasants, since the Vikings did not sow or plow, mainly because they were at sea during the sowing season (April) and harvest season (August).
On average, a peasant farm in the Novgorod land in the 15th–244,5th centuries, that is, very close to the peasant farm of the Varangian era, could produce 30 poods of commercial grain per year (26 kg). Thus, in order to collect grain for a sea voyage of one ship for 52 people, 12,6 peasant farms were required, and to provide the ship's crew for the voyage and for wintering on the shore, that is, throughout the year - 18 peasant farms. To transport XNUMX tons of grain, XNUMX carts are required.
Now the meat. 2,7 tons of meat is quite a lot. A medieval cow, as follows from recent studies of the osteological remains of cattle in Yaroslavl in the 250th–160th centuries, was not well-fed, and its average weight was about XNUMX kg. A taskanka, that is, a cow that men dragged by the horns to the outskirts after a hungry winter to feed, weighed even less — XNUMX kg.
The slaughter weight of lean cows is approximately 45% of the live weight, and emaciated cows - 40% of the live weight. So, an average medieval cow yielded about 100 kg of meat. Thus, to prepare 2,7 tons of meat, it was necessary to slaughter 27-30 cows. A whole herd! That's enough for one ship's crew for a year.
Corned beef in a barrel. To make this supply, not only meat was needed, but also a lot of salt
Now the socio-economic dimension of the issue. 52 peasant households with 15 poods of commercial grain is a moderately prosperous household. But in the village there were rich, prosperous and poor households. If we consider that the grain and cattle were handed over by the prosperous half of the village, and the poor half worked for hire: to bring, load, stack and so on, then one ship crew needed 104 peasant households to supply with a total population of 468 souls (4,5 mouths per household on average).
This is minimal, provided that almost all commercial products, both grain and livestock, are handed over. This was only possible through trade and exchange of products for some liquid values for the peasant household, for example, iron products. If supplies were collected through the collection of a tax in kind, then in order to supply the ship's crew and not cause excessive resistance from the peasants, 200-250 peasant households or more would be needed, depending on local conditions.
Here, robbing peasants did not work. The crews that returned to their base at the end of September - beginning of October had to be greeted as dear guests, with refreshments and stocked barns. Otherwise, the ship would not go to sea the following year.
Industrial scale blanks
Until now we have been talking about only one drakkar and its 30 Viking crew. And that was a whole volost needed to supply it on the campaign and on the shore.
But we know that the Vikings assembled huge fleets, many hundreds of ships.
This drawing shows 7 ships. The drawing is not very accurate, since it is unlikely that the ships were moving so closely together, and there is no large pile of barrels and bags of supplies on them, which would be clearly visible even from afar
Sometimes historians, doubting the number of ships mentioned in the chronicles, try to understate it, saying that not only large ships were counted, but also boats. Let's assume that there were boats. Only this boat had to have a minimum seaworthiness to get from Norway to France with a crew and supplies on board, which implies a certain size of this boat. In other words, this argument is far-fetched, and we can reject it. The chroniclers' informants counted the Viking ships by masts and sails, mostly correctly.
This means that the Vikings had a strong enough economic base to equip such huge fleets.
Based on our data, we can say how much food would be needed for the fleets.
So, for a squadron of 100 ships for a 180-day voyage at sea, 630 tons of grain and 135 tons of meat are required. But we will calculate based on annual consumption. 1260 tons of grain is 5153 moderately prosperous peasant households or more than 10 thousand peasant households with a population of 45 thousand people, taking into account the stratification of the village. 270 tons of meat is the slaughter of 2700 cows.
These are all practically industrial scale grain and meat procurements. And we know that the Vikings assembled even larger fleets, much larger than 100 pennants. And they assembled them not just a couple of times, but often, and sometimes fought year after year with large naval units. This suggests that they had a whole peasant country at their disposal, which supplied them with grain, meat, leather and other agricultural products in abundance. In my opinion, the main source of grain and meat for the Vikings was the southern Baltic coast, where grain from the entire Vistula basin and its numerous tributaries flowed to several large coastal cities, such as Wolin, through a well-established and large-scale grain trade for silver, in this case, Arab dirhams. That is, the Vikings sailed and fought, and the Slavs plowed, and the Vikings and the Slavs lived in perfect harmony, since the intense Viking attacks on the Christian states of Western Europe lasted for more than a hundred years.
These are the results obtained by the "key method" based on Soviet planning methods. The "key" in this case is the inventory of supplies of a German whaling vessel, and then extrapolation is made based on sample data. The method is not very reliable, but it was often used in the absence of detailed statistical materials, which is exactly what we are in. The Vikings somehow did not bother to leave us a report on the supplies of their fleets.
And we immediately see how many people were involved in this matter, not counting the Vikings themselves on the ships. And we get the opportunity to at least approximately understand the real structure of that political and economic system of relations that provided for the sea voyages of the Vikings.
Let professional historians continue to professionally retell the chronicles.
Information