"Availability of processed metal" Topic

I posted this a couple days ago, but never saw it amongst the messages.
Once upon a time, I recall reading an estimate that there was about a pound (.453 kilograms) of metal for every person in Europe around 1000 AD. I've been thinking about this as I paint Vikings over the past few years (that byrnie means a bunch of folks have practically no metal), and wondered if it were true, correct, etc.

Anybody seen this sort of information? Source?

Grelber

Can't claim to know the source of such a statistic, but seems very plausible.

My background is in archaeological conservation/research having worked for places like Jorvik and now make a chunk of my income from making historic replicas for experimental archaeology projects, museum display, TV/film and re-enactors.

I go to great lengths to stress to all my clients the apparent rarity and value of things like iron and steel during the early medieval period and that the iconic armed Viking warriors with sword, mail and helm were the equivalent of millionaires in the modern world…. I've heard it said the average early medieval "peasant" would probably own little more than a small knife by way of metal tools, and the average size of knife blade from this period is about 60-80mm long.

By way of arms and armours it's a little easier to gauge things for Anglo Saxons as there's a bit more written documentation relating to the raising of fyrds where every hundred was required to provide one man armed with a spear, shield and helmet, and we're not talking huge amounts of iron/steel used in the making of those.

Its a bit problematic to leap from an amount of metal per head of population
to the equipment of the average warrior. A large part of the population would be youngsters aged under 16 because that is the norm in societies with a low life expectation. They need hardly any metal at all…a knife for eating, perhaps. Wonen do not need much metal..a knife or two , some jewellery. Agricultural workers will have part of a plow, some shears., an axe head, a billhook, a hoe, maybe some chain? for a basic warrior spearheads, shield boss, knife. for an archer arrowheads and a knife.
In a house you might have some hinges and a cooking spit, not much else in metal. That leaves the top end of society that provides the warriors, perhaps 5 percent of the whole.bThey can have helmet, sword , byrnie, shield boss, stirrups and horse tack. Proportionately they are more like people today who own a Mecedes or a BMW or whatever the US high end equivalent is.

Free-associating off the top of my head with no particular research…

In Little Red Riding Hood, The Woodsman killed The Wolf with an axe.

Robin Hood's Merry Men duked it out with wooden quarterstaves.

Viking raiders were often armed mainly with axes and wooden shields.

It seems that a European peasant with an axe was a well-armed peasant for much of the middle ages.

That leaves the top end of society that provides the warriors, perhaps 5 percent of the whole.

Depending on time and place, the real warrior elite with state-of-art armour might be actually closer to 1 percent of the total population, taking into account children, women and elderly. And in a Viking society, a portion of the population was actually slaves.

Metal was quite expensive in the pre-industrial times, requiring quite a lot of work to mine, refine and work into practical objects. In northern Europe, wood tended to be easily available and relatively easy to work (especially once you had a metal knife and axe), and a lot of household items tended to be homemade out of wood.

There are three, count 'em, three Viking era helmets extant in Scandinavia. Some people have argued this is proof that helmets were astonishingly rare. I'd suggest that it proves they were valuable – which is almost, but not quite the same thing.

Since metal clearly was a valuable commodity, and iron can be reforged fairly easily, we may actually underestimate the number of things available to our ancestors. The helmet is passed on through generations, then, when too decrepit, becomes a hinge and a handful of nails. That's why we have no helmet as an archaeological find.

Of course, this doesn't mean armour was common. It just means it was a bit less rare.

For myself, I dream of owning a spoon ---

My 5 per cent is based on a logic. If a hide is a notional amount of land that can support a family and the concept of the five hide system is that t produces one well equipped warrior for each fve hides then. if we assumed for people erhousehold 20 people are spporting/ providing one fighting man. Fcourse some households have more than four, some less. However, there are warriors who are the personal retainers of the earldormen, or later earls and the mercenaries that kings and great nobles employed. There are also, of course some estates that are under assessed for service through some deal with the king. Then again there is the question of townsmen, do they count as warriors? cThey are obviously expected to man the walls. In 1066 the Londoners emerge to fight, in 1067 Exeter rebels and stands seige. There are also the rustics who turn up to fight at Hastings, though they will not have had much iron on them.

"If a hide is a notional amount of land that can support a family and the concept of the five hide system is that t produces one well equipped warrior for each fve hides then."

I'd support that hypothesis on the basis of early Irish law texts. Five clients gets you into consideration as one of the better off classes. A group of five farmers is the basic building block of the law.

You could drag your clients off to war but they wont be as well equipped as you. They will have a spear and shield(one of each for each household I'd suggest) you will have that and a sword, axe, javelins and whatever armour is in reach.

Of course you are also someone else's client and if he calls his boys out you are all equally well equipped. Beyond this is your lord's lord. At this stage the professionals appear, household warriors and very well equipped clients. You are now in the second rank.

The difference between the amount of metal required at each stage is marked.

That leaves the top end of society that provides the warriors, perhaps 5 percent of the whole.

though the truth is we'll probably never know for sure 5% seems very high, even 1% is probably a generous assessment, though even within the few centuries of the period we refer to as the dark ages things changed a lot.

The hundred is usually interpreted as an administrative district capable of supporting one hundred households, if it's expected that each hundred should be able to provide at least one man armed with a spear, shield and helm, then depending upon how large you judge an early medieval household to be ( potentially up to a couple of dozen, but certainly far more then the modern immediate family) then we're likely to be looking at a fraction of 1% being well armed.

Perhaps another way of looking at it is to reckon on this being a time when the national population of the UK may have been about 2million, then calculate a percentage working back from the number of troops at major battles like Brunanburgh or Hastings, and how many of the nations fighting men we likely to be dragged along to those battles; Lots of speculation as to just what percentage you end up with but most likely well below 1%.

My 5 per cent is based on a logic. If a hide is a notional amount of land that can support a family and the concept of the five hide system is that t produces one well equipped warrior for each fve hides then. if we assumed for people erhousehold 20 people are spporting/ providing one fighting man. Fcourse some households have more than four, some less.

I would suggest that four persons would be a rather small household – in the old times people used to live in larger families than in modern times. So you might easily have three generations under the same roof, and the youngest generation might be quite large (though high childhood mortality would result in only a portion of them reaching adulthood). Besides that, there might well be some unmarried relative and a couple of servants in the house. Thus, a household could possibly contain 6-10 persons rather than four.

Metal was quite expensive in the pre-industrial times, requiring quite a lot of work to mine, refine and work into practical objects. In northern Europe, wood tended to be easily available and relatively easy to work (especially once you had a metal knife and axe), and a lot of household items tended to be homemade out of wood.

As a childhood history book put it: the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages are misnamed: wood was more common into the nineteenth century.

Aidan, I doubt we diiffer on the number of well equipped warriors being small, though if the population f the UK is 2 million we are including the Scots Picts, Welsh as well as the English in that. 1% of 2 million is 20,000 and I would buy that in terms of well equipped as a possivle number, that is mailshirt, helmet, sword, spears, shield, horse, likely a servant too. As a an upward modifier to that the country absorbs and settles the Viking Great aarmy and that might well be 8000 warriors, There may 20,000 a side at Brunanburh which has the English army at its peak and the combined firces of Scots, Danes and Norse against them. That would give 40,000 men from the UK area in one pkace.Its highly likely that this was not all if the available force , especially if Athelstan was using the Alfredian system of having half the fyrd on callout at any one time. . Opits also clear that individual ealdormen are capable of fighting Viking forces with just the men of their shire, Byrrhtnoth of Essex, for example. Now mabe the Vikings at Maldon have only a few hundred men, but it is possible that the force has about 3000 men and that would put the Essex force as roughly equal. Simikaly in Alfred's reign the men of Berkshire and Wiltshire attack the Danes at Reading and these Danes are a substantial force with several kings that forms a meaningful opponent to a West Saxon Royal army. If shires had forces of a couple of thousan then the number of select warriors could be 60,000 across England, though they would not be all on an expedition because transporting and feeding that number beyond their county boundaries would be impractical . I donaccept that within the higher totals are lots of men with spears and a shield.
As to helmets being found archaeologically , considering that Rome had half a million men under arms for 600 years we have realatively few of their helmets surviving, I wonder how many of the 20 million or so helmets there must have been around in WW2. will survive outside of museums in say two centuries?

A significant amount of weaponry, including pattern welded swords and shield bosses, has been recovered from Illerup Ådal, Denmark since 1956, when the river valley was drained.

Along with male human remains, most likely captive warriors, the items of the main site were apparently put beyond use and then cast into the waters after a battlefield victory against a thousand strong invading Norwegian army c.220 AD. However, other unrelated sites have also been excavated with finds dating up to 500 AD, PDF link
The following link is more dated, but provides useful weapon finds totals when considering the spread of equipment in a Nordic force of that period. link
More recent work at Alkan Enge provides an insight into the events that followed the battle. It is unrelated to the question of weaponry, but included for completeness, link
As an aside, the bulk of the equipment, including horse harnesses, is now on display at Moesgård Musuem near Århus.

Thanks for the link Janner, really good stuff.

My pleasure

Its well out of period but can we learn anything from the 3000 lances said to be fielded by the Armstrongs. We know where they lived and possibly total population for their area is recorded somewhere in Scottish records.

Handy – now if only we knew someone who specialised in Scottish military history