[Regia-NA] The shield wall

[Steve Etheridge]

Wil wrote

>I ran across the above article online last week. Does it seem that the 
>author is
>perhaps assigning too much formality and discipline to the Viking Age 
>shield
>wall? Do you think the average 10th century army could effectively pull off 
>the
>different arrangements and layouts? I've always just seen the Viking Age 
>shield
>wall as a sort of positive side effect of warriors simply lining up to 
>fight,
>rather than the almost Hellenic formations and orders implied in the 
>article.
>

While it is impossible to be definite on how Viking age armies were 
organised, there is a tendency to assume that the image was the reality.

Thus - Romans are organised, they have all the same kit, they have all the 
same training, and they fight in the same way.

Vikings are disorganised.  They praise individual skill and bravery above 
teamwork, and take orders, if at all, with reluctance.

It is possible to poke holes with the first - I was actually quite surprised 
to find out that the Latin Orders that the Roman Marching Societies on this 
side of the pond use come from no millitary manual, but were in fact made 
up, because "they thought the Romans would have had them"

However, the second is an abiding image.  It is also the image of "barbarian 
warfare" generally, and difficult to shake.  However, how you fight depends 
on where you are fighting, and what your objectives are.

Take a typical Viking raid, a "strandhogg" (Called a "Chevauchee" in the 
later middle ages).  You pick a high value target - a church, or a rich 
estate, or (if you have the men) a town.  You hit hard, overwhelm any 
defences with superior numbers, carry away anything portable and valuable, 
and traditionally burn the rest to give any persuing forces something else 
to worry about rather than trying to catch you.  The last thing that you 
want is a formal, stand-up fight.  Because this warfare is (in modern 
parlance) "irregular", does not mean that the troops involved in it are any 
less well trained or disciplined than the regular troops.  Would you suggest 
that special forces are more poorly trained than the regulars?  yet they 
engage in "low intensity" warfare.

However, the invasion proper requires a different way of doing things.  Here 
you _want_ to have a stand up fight.  If you are invading, then you want to 
find the opposing army and demolish it to stamp your authority over the 
area.  If defending, then you want to remove the invaders off your land.  
Here then, there will be much picking of land, formal tactics and 
discipline.  The question was, were these indulged in in the Viking age?

I have come across the same sort of phrase in far too many textbooks.  
"Battles of the period were little more than organised football hooliganism" 
and "Swordplay consisted of unscientific clubbing".  I would question wether 
the authors of phrases similar to the last had ever picked up a well 
preserved Broadsword. Those who are guilty of the first cliche have 
obviously not heard (as the police have, to thier cost) that some hooligans 
can be very well organised indeed.  This is all part of the image problem.  
To have tactics and discipline, there is a need for organisation and 
training.

There is of course, evidence for both of these in other places in Europe, 
most obviously Constantinople, but an amount for England as well.  The 
Viking homelands had contact with both of these areas, and fought both for 
and against them with some success.  In Denmark, we find clear evidence of 
millitary organisation - the Danevirke, and the Trellborg style forts are 
obvious examples.  The latter, although perhaps only used for a generation, 
show not only central control but central planning as well.  They would have 
been ideal barracks for the training of an army - possibly for the 
unifcation and defence of Denmark.

The fact that an Anglo-Scandanavian army at hastngs could stand for a day 
against mass cavalry charges (the like of which shocked both byzantine and 
arab armies into submission within a generation) gives a good indication of 
the level of discipline and courage that was attainable.  Please remember 
that it takes a good degree of training for someone to put thier life in 
peril just because someone has given an order.  As we have found out on 
numerous occasions, it only takes one man to flee or fall for a shieldwall 
to break.  There is also an evolutionary principle at work.  Those armies 
that are well organised will survive, those who are not will fall.

It is interesting to note that Vegitius, writer of the first manual for the 
Roman army was written in the c4th - at a time when the Roman army relied 
heavily on Germannic mecenaries.  One formation he describes, a flying 
wedge, we meet in Saxo Grammaticus, a c12th historian, describing "Viking" 
tactics.  This does not prove that the Vikings carried on a tradition of 
warfare dating back to the Romans - Saxo might have read Vegitius, or one of 
the contemporary commanders might have.  But the formations described are 
complex enough to let us know that in the C12th it was thought that their 
recent ancestors fought in a organised, disciplined fashion.

Another pointer is the ships that they fought in.  The Skuldev 2 wreck, the 
largest so far reconstructed (although not the largest found) has 33 pairs 
of oars.  Each rowing bench is about a yard from the one in front or behind. 
  What this means is that you have to row exactly in time with the people 
around you, otherwise you are not rowing at all.  Discipline and teamwork 
are required normally - what this was like in battle conditions (and this 
was most definietly a warship) I can only imagine.

Practical experimentation has shown that it does not take too much to take 
an army of beginners and train them to march and fight as a shieldwall in 
the heat of non lethal combat.  When the stakes were higher, I suspect that 
the training would have been tougher as well.

So to answer your question, no, I don't beleive that the formations shown 
are at all unlikely in the Viking age, and would most likely have been used 
- along with a few others that they appear to have missed out!

Steve

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