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A Medieval Skin Boat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Paul Johnstone
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Extract

Skin boats have an assured but unsatisfactory place in history. Assured, because the literary references to them are many and interesting. Unsatisfactory, S because archaeologically it is unlikely that any remains, by their nature, will ever be found to give an idea of what they were 1ike. James Hornell has summarized many of the literary references to the part they played in Northern Europe during the Classical and Dark Ages in his well-known work on British coracles and Irish curraghs. In the Roman period they are mentioned by Caesar, Lucan, Pliny, Strabo, Solinus, Sidonius Apollinaris and Avienus. Pliny specifically mentions their part in the cross-channel tin trade. The references in Caesar and Lucan are also particularly significant, as will become clear below.

Later in the Dark Ages, according to the old Irish stories, Bran and Maelduin used curraghs, or hide-covered boats, for their voyages and Teigue, son of Cian, raided nearly to Spain. In the other direction, St Brendan reached the Shetlands and possibly Iceland as well. St Columba, of course, travelled from Ireland to Iona in a curragh. Niall of the Nine Hostages raided Wales in a fleet of curraghs and his grandson, Breccan, lost 50 in Breccan’s Cauldron, the Corryvreckan which fishermen still avoid today. In the medieval period, Froissart and Holinshed show that Caesar’s use of leather-covered coracles to get armies across rivers survived amongst the troops of Edward III and Henry V, though one imagines they were stouter craft than those described by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Description of Wales, which, Giraldus claimed, could be overturned by a blow from the tail of the salmon which the coracle fishermen were trying to catch.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 36 , Issue 141 , March 1962 , pp. 32 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1962

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References

1 J. G. D. Clark, Prehistoric Europe, London, 1952, p. 283, says that a skeleton found in an oval basket in the clay of the Ancholme estuary may have been a coracle-burial.

2 J. Hornell, Water Transport, Origins and Early Evolution, Cambridge, 1946, p. 114.

3 J. Hornell, op. cit., pp. 112-113.

4 Pliny, translated H. Rackham. Natural History, London, 1942, p. 199.

5 J. Hornell, op. cit., pp. 137-142.

6 Froissart, Chronicles, A.D. 1360.

7 Holinshed, the last volume of The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, A.D. 1577, p. 1171.

8 Giraldus Cambrensis, translated by Sir R. Colt Hoare, The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin Through Wales, A.D. MCLXXXIIII, 1806, 2 volumes, II, pp. 332-333.

9 Hornell, op. cit., p. 141.

10 T. C. Lethbridge, Herdsmen and Hermits, Cambridge, 1950, p. 76.

11 Glyn Daniel, Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of France, London, 1960, p. 20.

12 Clark, op. cit., p. 292.

13 Clark, op. cit., p. 283.

14 T. C. Lethbridge, Boats and Boatmen, London, 1952, p. 120.

15 ANTIQUITY, vol. XXXIV, no. 135, September, 1960, 161-162.

16 L. Casson, The Ancient Mariners, London, 1959, pp. 1-2.

17 Stuart Piggott, Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles, Cambridge, 1954, pp. 89-90.

18 A. W. Brøgger and Haakon Shetelig, The Viking Ships, Oslo, 1951, p. 12.

19 For a division of these ships into categories, see Eva and Per Fett, Sydvestnorske Helleristninger, Stavanger, 1941, p. 158.

20 Romola and R. C. Anderson, The Sailing Ship, London, 1926, p. 60.

21 Brøgger and Shetelig, op. cit.

22 Hornell, op. cit.

23 Clark, op. cit.

24 Lethbridge, op. cit.

25 Anderson, op. cit.

26 Casson, op. cit.

27 G. S. L. Clowes, Sailing Ships, Their History and Development, Science Museum, London, 1930.

28 A. Grabar and C. Nordenfalk, Romanesque Painting, Lausanne, 1958, p. 73.

29 MS Ashmole 1511, fol. 86v.

30 Brøgger and Shetelig, op. cit., p. 15 and p. 17.

31 Clark, op. cit., pl. IV (b)

32 Julius Caesar, De Bello Civile, Book I, cap. IV.

‘Caesar, ut naves faciant, cuius generis eum superioribus armis usus Britanniae docuerat. Carinae ac prima statumina alvei materia fiebant; reliquum corpus navium viminibus contextum coriis integebatur’.

33 Lucan, translated by J. D. Duff, M.A., The Civil War, London, 1928, p. 185.

34 Christian Zervos, L’Art de la Catalogne, Paris, 1937, plate 150.

35 E. G. Millar, English Illuminated Manuscripts, Paris and Brussels, 1926, p. 76.

36 Anderson, op. cit., p. 72.

37 Anderson, op. cit., pp. 89-90.

38 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, translated by Rev. James Ingram, London, 1912, p. 75.

39 T. C. Lethbridge, Herdsmen and Hermits, Cambridge, 1950, p. 75.

40 British Museum, add MS. 39943.