There is an old manuscript in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, dating from about A.D. 1000, in which appear three pictures of Noah's Ark (see p. 26). The house part of the design is frankly impossible--it would capsize the ship--but the hull in each case--the boat part--is not at all unlike the well-known Bayeux-tapestry ships, but of a better and more seaworthy shape, though in some of them the big dragon figure-head is unduly exaggerated. The space between the benches was called a "room", and the port and starboard portions of this were known as "half-rooms". The crew were all told off to these half-rooms as their stations, except those quartered forward and aft. Thus the "Long Serpent" had eight men to each "half-room", and from this item of information it has been estimated that she carried a crew of something between six and seven hundred men. Goodness knows how many King Canute's big "Dreadnought" carried. Some of these Viking ships were very smartly decorated. Armorial bearings had not then been invented, but their sails were worked with the most beautiful emblematic and intricate embroidery, and were not infrequently made of velvet, though generally of a coarse woollen material called "vadmal." Some of the most elaborate ones were actually lined with fur. Not only the ships themselves, but also their sails, like the swords of their warriors, were given poetical sounding names: "The Cloth of the Wind", "The Beard of the Yard", and "The Tapestry of the Mast-head", are some of them. Along their gunwales, above the oars, which worked through holes in the ship's side, ran the "shield-row", composed of circular wooden shields or targets, with big shining bosses of brass or other metal in the middle. Each shield overlapped the next till it touched its boss, and so gave a double protection to the rowers. This was a very ancient custom, as shields were carried in this way by Phoenician ships as far back as 450 B.C. As a general rule, the Norsemen's shields were black and yellow, the Danes' red, and the Saxons' white with red or blue edges. [Illustration: A "Dragon" Figure-head There was a law that ships must not approach the land with their figure-heads in position with "gaping heads and yawning snouts."] It is rather curious that, with the exception of black, these colours are conspicuous in the flags of the corresponding nations of to-day. But the King of Norway presented our King Athelstan, in 931, with a ship fitted with a complete row of _golden_ shields.