Patches of skin supposedly flayed from Viking raiders and attached to the doors of some English churches are actually animal hides, a genetic analysis has revealed.
At least four medieval churches in England have remains of these so-called daneskins. The most well-known example is from St. Botolph’s church in Hadstock, near Cambridge. According to local myth, St. Botolph’s macabre adornment was taken from a Viking after they attempted to pillage the church, the door of which dates back to the 11th century.
To learn more, at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues analysed skin fragments from three of the four known churches: St. Botolph’s; St Michael & All Angels Church in Copford, near Colchester; and Westminster Abbey in London. Daneskin is also attached to a door in Worcester Cathedral, but Macleod doesn’t yet have permission to test this sample.
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The team analysed five daneskin samples from the three churches’ doors, which were either taken from the doors directly or were held in a museum. Collagen, a key skin protein, was analysed via ZooMS, a technique that identifies animal species according to their collagen.
The results, presented at the 2022 in Aberdeen, reveal that none of the skins came from a Viking. Two of the churches’ daneskins were actually cowhide, while the Copford skin came from a horse or donkey, which have very similar collagen fingerprints to each other.
This supports an old hypothesis that these skins were put on church doors to make them more attractive, says at the University of Aberdeen.
A medieval author known as Theophilus Presbyter, thought to have been a monk born around 1070, wrote the book On Divers Arts, which gives instructions on how to build churches. It states that wooden doors should be covered with animal hide, before being smoothed and whitened, to show off the doors’ intricate ironwork.
“Church doors had an immense symbolic meaning – these were the gateways to paradise,” says Geddes. “The skins mean the ironwork would have been sitting on smooth leather; it would have looked like a casket or treasure chest.”
The origin of the Viking folklore is unclear, but the myth persisted for centuries. In the 1970s, , an expert on leather at the University of Leeds, UK, analysed the St. Botolph’s skin at Geddes’s request.
Reed mistakenly concluded the skin was human, probably from “a person with fair or greying hair”, supporting the legend that it came from a flayed Viking after they attempted to pillage the church.
“The story is that the villagers were not very happy about this, so they proceeded to kill the Viking, flay him and nail his skin to the church door as a warning to other people,” says Macleod.
