When you think of a Viking, what are you picturing? Someone wearing layers of fur with snow-capped mountains in the background? As the Viking people originated from Scandinavia, and these Nordic countries are often seen as “wintery” places, it’s common for Vikings and the coldest season of the year to be linked in our minds. But what was the reality of winter in Jorvik? Let’s have a closer look at some artefacts to find out…
Warm clothing is essential to keep out the winter chill. Vikings wore cloaks as their outer layer and these were typically made from a piled fabric, often in a double layer. This textile fragment shares many of the characteristics of a Viking cloak including two layers of thick wool fabric, and a looped weave for extra warm and wind resistance.
The cloak would have been held closed with a pin or brooch. The most common type of brooches to be used on cloaks are the larger trefoil, penannular and disk styles. As winter garments were made from thick, woven wool, they needed the strength and weight of a heavier fastening.
Even with the warmest clothing, if you’ve got cold feet then the rest of you will be cold too. But the Vikings had a solution to that. They wore socks! This wool sock has been made using a technique called ‘nålebinding’ which creates a heavier, almost double-thickness fabric…perfect to keep your toes warm on a cold winter’s day. There are signs of heavy wear and the wool has become felted in places, which shows that the sock had been worn and walked on many times. Although Viking-age socks are not a rare find in European excavations, this example is the only one to have been discovered in England which makes it an amazing archaeological discovery.
Viking-age life during the winter wasn’t only about avoiding the cold weather. Just like today there were pastimes that could only be enjoyed a few months of the year, including ice skating. Over 40 animal bone ice-skates were found at Coppergate. Most of them show signs of extensive use so skating must have been a regular activity, whether it was for fun or a practical solution to winter transport. Skates would have been worn attached to everyday shoes. A leather strap was wedged into a hole in the heel end of the skate, using a wooden peg, and then tied around the shoe. Many have been shaped into a point and curved up at the toe end, a design feature intended to make it easier to travel over uneven patches of ice. Poles would have been required to pull the skater along.
Excavations have uncovered lots of evidence of the types of food being eaten in Jorvik, with the local diet including a range of meat, fish,grains, fruit and vegetables . Although we can’t tell from the archaeological remains alone exactly when specific foods featured on the Viking menu, we know that their availability varied with the seasons. Luckily the climate in northern England hasn’t changed a huge amount over the past 1000 years, so it’s fairly easy to divide their annual diet into the different seasons. Winter food would have included hardier root vegetables and shellfish, as well as meat and fish that had been smoked or dried earlier in the year, and fruits like cherries and plums preserved in the summer so they could be eaten out of season.
Changes inside a Jorvik home would also reflect the different seasons. Although the home’s central fire provided the largest amount of indoor lighting, smaller light sources like rush lamps and wax candles were used too. During the winter months, when it gets darker much earlier in the day, they would have needed even more of these lamps and candles. This socketed iron candleholder is a clever solution to having too many candles on the floor or on low surfaces. The horizontal spike would have been driven into the wooden wall of the house keeping the candle in the ‘socket’ pointing up.
Although life in Viking York would have been very different from today, the changes they made to adapt to the colder months are very similar to the changes we make to our day-to-day life during winter.
