Someone in my archaeology class made this comment, and I thought it to be a bit odd, having been to several house sites, I found it odd I had never heard of this fact before. I quickly checked some of my books, to see if there was any truth to this and found nothing. So am I right in doubting this or is there any truth to it at all?
Doors were low not as a defensive measure but because houses were low. This was the case up to the late 1800s, for several reasons.
See for example this croft house from the 1790s.
The fact that the lower walls could be isolated by peat being piled against the wall, almost up to the windows (if any) like in this drawing would make the house look even lower and as if it was sitting very low in the ground, and would make for a high treshold for the door too, making the door even smaller.
Houses were low because it was hard to keep them warm before the tiled stove became affordable for anyone. Experiments with viking age technology have shown that 12-14 degrees indoors during winter is the largest temperature that was worth the effort of felling enough trees, dragging them home, sawing them into suitable pieces, chopping firewood and storing it to dry for 1-1,5 years. Once the chimney and glass window made their entrances during medieval times, this improved, but not by much.
A lower roof means less air to warm up and thus more heat for the same amount of firewood. Very little work was done indoors, and the work that was done indoors were usually made sitting down (mending tools, sewing, carding wool, cooking etc), not standing, so having a high roof were not that big an advantage either.
A viking would almost never opt to fight indoors. If you wanted to kill someone in a house, you set it on fire and waited for them to come outside. Besides, most people spent most of their waking time outdoors anyway, tending to crops, animals and other work that needed to be done. Houses were dark inside, often with the hole in the roof for the smoke to escape (the wind-eye) as the only source of light besides a small, smoldering fire. Going inside a house was to ask to be ambushed by someone in there whose eyes were accustomed to the darkness and knew the house inside out.
Viking houses were not fortified buildings and very little regard for defence was taken in their construction. A pallisade would be erected around the homestead if the owner wanted something for defence.
