Purbeck Saxon Longship Project

Hi I'm Joe from the West Saxon Reenactment Group SÆXIA, and we'd love you to help us achieve a unique dream: the Anglo Saxon Chronicle describes how King Alfred, upon defeating the Dane/Viking Army under Guthrum, proceeded to build himself a navy of longships to continue the defense of his realm by sea, against the Dane/Viking longships already infamous for their speed and manoeuvrability. But what did these Saxon longships look like? The Chronicle merely states that they were not in the same style as the Dane or Frisian ships, but were built as King Alfred saw fit, to be able to successfully defend against these Viking pirates and take the fight to them. From the excerpt from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle in the picture above, it seems King Alfreds warships were bigger, possibly higher sided or wider, and able to outrun and out manoeuvre the classic Viking Drakkars..

We want to design and build, and sail, a well researched hypothetical Saxon warship based on what evidence there is, and the technology they had at the time, and be able to then take it to sea and pit it against existing reconstructed longships in speed, manoeuvrability and sail, and see if we can shed that little bit more light on the dark ages ....

Most recent work is a speculative test-of-concept on a prototype for the longship figurehead, based on on existing AngloSaxon and Scandinavian longship figurehead but with its own unique qualities.

The figurehead research and work so far thanks to the kind donations already received for this project: both already featured on our record of the Saxon Longship Partners pictured below!

This board gets taken to our events too, like the one in Corfe Castle earlier this year ...

We also have a potential premises for beginning the build of a smaller scaled down longship as a prototype: as soon as we have the initial funding we can partner with the Wareham Woodshop utilising the workspace and lifting apparatus pictured below ...