Longship - Legacy

Legacy

The Vikings were major contributors to the shipbuilding technology of their day. Their shipbuilding methods spread through extensive contact with other cultures, and ships from the 11th and 12th centuries are known to borrow many of the longships’ design features, despite the passing of many centuries. The Lancha Poveira, a boat from Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal is one of the last remnants from the longship, keeping all the longboat features but without a long stern and bow, and with a Mediterranean sail. It was used until the 1950s. Today there is just one boat: Fé em Deus.

Many historians, archaeologists and adventurers have reconstructed longships in an attempt to understand how they worked. These re-creators have been able to identify many of the advances that the Vikings implemented in order to make the longship a superior vessel. One replica longship covered 223 nautical miles (413 km) in a single day, and another re-creator was able to go faster than 8 knots (15 km/h) in his longship.

The longship was a master of all trades. It was wide and stable, yet light, fast, and nimble. With all these qualities combined in one ship, the longship was unrivaled for centuries, until the arrival of the great Cog.

In Scandinavia, the longship was the usual vessel for war even with the introduction of cogs in the 12th–13th centuries. Leidang fleet-levy laws remained in place for most of the Middle Ages, demanding that the freemen should build, man and furnish ships for war if demanded by the king—ships with at least 20 or 25 oar-pairs (40–50+ rowers). However, by the late 14th century, these low-boarded vessels were at a disadvantage against newer, taller vessels – when the Victual Brothers, in the employee of the Hansa, attacked Bergen in the autumn of 1393, the "great ships" of the pirates could not be boarded by the Norwegian levy ships called out by Margaret I of Denmark and the raiders were able to sack the town with impunity. While earlier times had seen larger and taller longships in service, by this time the authorities had also gone over to other types of ships for warfare. The last Viking longship was defeated in 1429.