Yesterday I attended online a most interesting set of lunchtime lectures at the Society of Antiquaries about the ongoing archaeological investigation of ‘The Gribshunden’. This was the flagship and floating command centre of King Hans of Denmark which sank off the coast of what is now southern Sweden, but was then still part of the Danish kingdom whilst sailing to an important meeting with the Swedish nobility at Kalmar in 1495. The King was hoping to reinvigorate the 1397 Union of the crowns of Denmark, Norway together with that of Sweden proclaimed at Kalmar in that year.
A reconstruction of the Gribshunden at sea
Image: Wikidata
The ships appears to have sunk in relatively shallow water following a possible explosion - it was heavily armed - but the waters of the Baltic are favourable to preserving rather than devouring ship timbers, as most notably with the Vasa in Stockholm harbour.
I have posted before about the Gribshunden in A fifteenth century King’s flagship.
I also wrote in Late fifteenth century Scandinavian Court cuisine and in More on the spices from the Gribshunden about the spices which had survived in the remains of the ship, and what they indicate about the life of the King and his courtiers
and the place of the Danish court in the international trade of the time.
There are two accessible, very detailed articles about the ship from the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology at The Danish Griffin: The Wreck of an Early Modern Royal Carvel from 1495 and from the Society for Combat Archaeology at Gribshunden: Significance and Preliminary Investigations
The Society of Antiquaries lectures are wide-ranging in their subject matter and free to watch online via their website and they also have recordings of previous lectures available. Yesterday’s set of talks by four experts working on different aspects of the project demonstrated the rich variety of discoveries already made from excavations of only a small portion of the ship. The vessel was about four-fifths the size of the Mary Rose but has already revealed comparable finds. Its potential, as is explained, is very considerable not just in terms of the development of ship building but also about life at the time and the links to the wider European culture of the end of the fifteenth century as well as to trading links on the other side of the world.
The lectures, which are only an hour in total but well illus, can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/live/UJtId-NdG1E?si=plZkOuZsfOT5gac-
A reconstruction technical drawing of the Gribshunden by Mats Vänehem
Image: Wikinedia
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