# The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway/Volume 1/Chapter 3

CHAP. III. OF THE SOCIAL CONDITION OF THE NORTHMEN.
If the historical sagas tell us little concerning the religion and religious establishments of the pagan Northmen, they give us incidentally a great deal of curious and valuable information about their social condition and institutions; and these are of great interest, because they are the nearest sources to which we can trace almost all that we call Anglo-Saxon in our own social condition, institutions, national character, and spirit. The following observations are picked up from the sagas. The reader of Snorro Sturleson's "Heimskringla" has before him the facts, or narratives, and can see himself whether the following inferences from them are warranted, and the views given of the singular state of society among the Northmen correctly drawn.
The lowest class in the community were the Thraell (Thralls, slaves). They were the prisoners captured by the vikings at sea on piratical cruises, or carried off from the coasts of foreign countries in marauding expeditions. These captives were, if not ransomed by their friends, bought and sold at regular slave markets. The owners could kill them without any fine, mulct, or manbod to the king, as in the case of the murder or manslaughter of a free man. King Olaf Tryggvesson, in his childhood, his mother Astrid, and his foster-father Thorolf, were captured by an Esthonian viking, as they were crossing the sea from Sweden on their way to Novogorod, and were divided among the crew, and sold. An Esthonian man called Klerkon got Olaf ​and Thorolf as his share of the booty; but Astrid was separated from her son Olaf then only three years of age. Klerkon thought Thorolf too old for a slave, and that no work would be got out of him to repay his food, and therefore killed him; but sold the boy to a man called Klærk for a goat. A peasant called Reas bought him from Klærk for a good cloak; and he remained in slavery until he was accidentally recognised by his uncle, who was in the service of the Russian king, and was by him taken to the court of Novogorod, where he grew up. His mother Astrid, apparently long afterwards, was recognised by a Norwegian merchant called Lodin at a slave market to which she had been brought for sale. Lodin offered to purchase her, and carry her home to Norway, if she would accept of him in marriage, which she joyfully agreed to; Lodin being a man of good birth, who sometimes went on expeditions as a merchant, and sometimes on viking cruises. On her return to Norway her friends approved of the match as suitable; and when her son, King Olaf Tryggvesson, came to the throne, Lodin and his sons by Astrid were in high favour. This account of the capturing, selling, and buying slaves, and killing one worn out, is related, as it would be at present in the streets of Washington, as an ordinary matter. Slavery among the Anglo-Saxons at this period, namely, in the last half of the 10th century, appears to have become rather an adscriptio glebæ—the man sold or transferred with the land—than a distinct saleable property in the person of the slave; at least we hear of no slave markets in England at which slaves were bought and sold. In Norway this class appears to have been better treated than on the south side of the Baltic, and to have had some rights. Lodin had to ask his slave Astrid to accept of him in marriage. We find them also in the first half of the 11th century, at least under some ​masters, considered capable of acquiring and holding property of their own. When Asbiorn came from Halogaland in the north of Norway to purchase a cargo of meal and malt, of which articles King Olaf the Saint, fearing a scarcity, had prohibited the exportation from the south of Norway, he went to his relation Erling Skialgsson, a peasant or bondi, who was married to a sister of the late King Olaf Tryggvesson, and was a man of great power. Erling told Asbiorn that in consequence of the law he could not supply him, but that his thralls or slaves could probably sell him as much as he required for loading his vessel; adding the remarkable observation, that they, the slaves, are not bound by the law and country regulation like other men,—evidently from the notion that they were not parties, like other men, to the making the law in the Thing. It is told of this Erling, who was one of the most considerable men in the country and brother-in-law of King Olaf Tryggvesson, although of the bonder or peasant class, that he had always 90 free-born men in his house, and 200 or more when Earl Hakon, then regent of the country, came into the neighbourhood; that he had a ship of 32 banks of oars; and when he went on a viking cruise, or in a levy with the king, had 200 men at least with him. He had always on his farm thirty slaves, besides other workpeople; and he gave them a certain task as a day's work to do, and gave them leave to work for themselves in the twilight, or in the night. He also gave them land to sow, and gave them the benefit of their own crops; and he put upon them a certain value, so that they could redeem themselves from slavery, which some could do the first or second year, and "all who had any luck could do it in the third year." With this money Erling bought new slaves, and he settled those who had thus obtained their freedom on his newly cleared land, and ​found employment for them in useful trades, or in the herring fishery, for which he furnished them with nets and salt. The same course of management is ascribed in the Saga of Saint Olaf to his stepfather, Sigurd Syr, who is celebrated for his prudence, and wisdom, and skill in husbandry; and it has probably been general among the slaveholders. The slaves who had thus obtained their freedom would belong to what appears to have been a distinct class from the peasants or bonders on the one hand, or the slaves on the other—the class of unfree men.
This class—the unfree—appears to have consisted of those who, not being udal-born to any land in the country, so as to be connected with, and have an interest in, the succession to any family estate, were not free of the Things; were not entitled to appear and deliberate in those assembles; were not Thingsmen. This class of unfree is frequently mentioned in general levies for repelling invasion, when all men, free and unfree, are summoned to appear in arms; and the term unfree evidently refers to men who had personal freedom, and were not thralls, as the latter could only be collected to a levy by their masters. This class would include all the cottars on the land paying a rent in work upon the farm to the peasant, who was udal-born proprietor; and, under the name of housemen, this class of labourers in husbandry still exists on every farm in Norway. It would include also, the house-carls, or freeborn indoor men, of whom Erling, we see, always kept ninety about him. They were, in fact, his body-guard and garrison, the equivalent to the troop maintained by the feudal baron of Germany in his castle; and they followed the bondi or peasant in his summer excursions of piracy, or on the levy when called out by the king. They appear to have been free to serve whom they pleased. We find many of the class of bonders ​who kept a suite of eighty or ninety men; as Erling, Harek of Thiotö, and others. Swein, of the little isle of Gairsay in Orkney, kept, we are told in the Orkneyinga Saga, eighty men all winter; and as we see the owner of this farm, which could not produce bread for one fourth of that number, trusting for many years to his success in piracy for subsisting his retainers, we must conclude that they formed a numerous class of the community. This class would also include workpeople, labourers, fishermen, tradesmen, and others about towns and farms, or rural townships, who, although personally free and freeborn, not slaves, were unfree in respect of the rights possessed by the class of bonders, landowners, or peasants, in the Things. They had the protection and civil rights imparted by laws, but not the right to a voice in the enactment of the laws, or regulation of public affairs in the Things of the country. They were, in their rights, in the condition of the German population at the present day.
The class above the unfree in civil rights, the free peasant-proprietors, or bonder class, were the most important and influential in the community. We have no word in English, or in any other modern language, exactly equivalent to the word bondi, because the class itself never existed among us. Peasant does not express it; because we associate with the word peasant the idea of inferior social importance to the feudal nobility, gentry, and landed proprietors of a country, and this bonder class was itself the highest class in the country. Yeoman, or, in Cumberland, statesman, expresses their condition only relatively to the portions of land owned by them; not their social position as the highest class of landowners. If the Americans had a word to express the class of small landholders in their old settled states who live on their little properties, have the highest social in​fluence in the country, and are its highest class, and, although without family aggrandisement by primogeniture succession, retain family distinction and descent, and even family pride, but divide their properties on the udal principle among their children, it would express more justly what the bonder class were than the words landholder, yeoman, statesman, peasant-proprietor, or peasant. In the following translation of the Heimskringla, where the word peasant is used for the word bondi, the reader will have to carry in mind that these peasants were, in fact, an hereditary aristocracy, comprehending the great mass of the population, holding their little estates by a far more independent tenure than the feudal nobility of other countries, and having their land strictly entailed on their own families and kin, and with much family pride, and much regard for and record of their family descent and alliances, because each little estate was entailed on each peasant's whole family and kin. Udal right was, and is to this day in Norway, a species of entail, in realty, in the family that is udal-born to it. The udal land could not be alienated by sale, gift to the church, esheat to a superior, forfeiture, or by any other casualty, from the kindred who were udal-born to it; and they had, however distantly connected, an eventual right of succession vested in them superior to any right a stranger in blood could acquire. The udal-born to a piece of land could evict any other possessor, and, ​until a very late period, even without any repayment of what the new possessor having no udal right may have paid for it, or laid out upon it; and at the present day a right of redemption within a certain number of years, is competent to those udal-born to an estate which has been sold out of a family. The right to the crown of Norway itself was udal-born right in a certain family or race, traced from Odin down to Harald Haarfager through the Yngling dynasty, as a matter of religious faith; but from Harald Haarfager as a fixed legal and historical point. All who were of his blood were udal-born to the Norwegian crown, and with equal rights of succession in equal degrees of propinquity. The eldest son had no exclusive right, either by law or in public opinion, to the whole succession, and the kingdom was more than once divided equally among all the sons. This principle of equal succession appears to have been so rooted in the social arrangement and public mind, that notwithstanding all the evils it produced in the succession to the crown by internal warfare between brothers, it seems never to have been shaken as a principle of right; and the kings who had laboured the most to unite the whole country into one sovereignty, as Harald Haarfager, were the first to divide it again among their sons. One cause of this may have been the impossibility, among all classes, from the king to the peasant, of providing otherwise for the younger branches of a family than by giving them a portion of the land itself, or of the products of the land paid instead of money taxes to the crown. Legitimacy of birth was held of little account, owing probably to marriage not being among the Odin-worshippers a religious as well as a civil act; for we find all the children, illegitimate as well as legitimate, esteemed equal in udal-born right even to the throne itself; and although high descent on the mother's side also ap​pears to have been esteemed, it was no obstacle even to the succession to the crown that the mother, as in the case of Magnus the Good, had been a slave. This was the consequence of polygamy, in which, as in the East, the kings indulged. Harald Haarfager had nine wives at once, and many concubines; and every king, even King Olaf the Saint, had concubines as well as wives; and we find polygamy indulged in down to about 1130, when Sigurd the Crusader's marriage with Cecilia, at the time his queen was alive and not divorced, was opposed by the Bishop of Bergen, who would not celebrate it; but nevertheless the priest of Stavanger performed the ceremony, on the king's duly paying the church for the indulgence. Polygamy appears not to have been confined to kings and great men; for we find in the old Icelandic law book, called the "Grey Goose," that, in determining the mutual rights of succession of persons born in either country, Norway or Iceland, in the other country, it is provided that children born in Norway in bigamy should have equal right as legitimate children,—which also proves that in Iceland civilisation was advanced so much farther than in Norway that bigamy was not lawful there, and its offspring not held legitimate. Each little estate was the kingdom in miniature, sometimes divided among children, and again reunited by succession of single successors by udal-born right vesting it in one. These landowners, with their entailed estates, old families, and extensive kin or clanship, might be called the nobility of the country, but that, from their great numbers and small properties, the tendency of the equal succession to land being to prevent the concentration of it into great estates, they were the peasantry. In social influence they had no class, like the aristocracy of feudal countries, above them. All the legislation, and the administration of law also, was in their hands. They alone conferred the crown at their Things. No man, however clear ​and undisputed his right of succession, ventured to assume the kingly title, dignity, and power, but by the vote and concurrence of a Thing. He was proposed by a bonder; his right explained; and he was received by the Thing before he could levy subsistence, or men and aid, or exert any act of kingly power within the jurisdiction of the Thing. After being received and proclaimed at the Ore Thing held at Drontheim as the general or sole king of Norway, the upper king,—which that Thing alone had the right to do,—he had still to present himself to each of the other district Things, of which there were four, to entitle him to exercise royal authority, or enjoy the rights of royalty within their districts. The bonders of the district, who had voice and influence in those Things by family connection and personal merit, were the first men in the country. Their social importance is illustrated by the remarkable fact, that established kings—as, for instance, King Olaf Tryggvesson—married their sisters and daughters to powerful bonders, while others of their sisters and daughters were married to the kings of Sweden and Denmark. Erling the bonder refused the title of Earl when he married Astrid, the king's sister. Lodin married the widow of a king, and the mother of King Olaf Tryggvesson. There was no idea of disparagement, or inferiority, in such alliances; which shows how important and influential this class was in the community. It is here, in these assemblies or Things of the Northmen, the immediate predecessors of the Norman conquerors, and their ancestors also,—by which, however rudely, legislation and all parliamentary principles were exercised,—that we must look for the origin of our parliaments, and the spirit and character of our people; on which, and not on the mere forms, our constitution is founded. The Wittenagemoth of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchic kings were not, like the ​Things of the Northmen, existing and influential assemblies of the people meeting suo jure at stated times, enacting and administering laws, and so interwoven with the whole social and political idiosyncracy of the people, that the state could have no movement or existence but through such assemblies. The Wittenagemoth, as the name implies, appears to have been merely a council of the wise and important men of the country, selected by the king to meet, consult, and advise with him,—which is as different from a Thing as a cabinet council from a parliament. The Northmen who invaded and colonised the kingdom of Northumberland, had entirely expelled other occupants in the 9th century. The Anglo-Saxons had fled before the pagan and barbarous invaders who seized and settled on the lands, and, from the proximity to Norway and Denmark, received a rapid accession to their numbers by the influx of new settlers, as well as by their own increase of population. Normandy was only conquered by the Northmen, but Northumberland was colonised. Their religion, language, and laws were established. They had their own, and not the Anglo-Saxon laws: a proof that they were a population not Anglo-Saxon in their social institutions. This appears from the laws of Edward the Elder, of Alfred himself, and from the treaties of these kings with Guthrun, the leader or chief of the Northmen who then occupied Northumberland. The kingdom of Northumberland, comprehending the present counties of York, Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, and parts of Lancashire; East Anglia also, comprehending the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk; and the country of the former East Saxons, comprehending Essex, Middlesex, and part of Hertfordshire, and also parts of the northern and southern extremities of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia,—were so entirely occupied by Danes, or people ​of Danish descent, that they were under Danish, not Anglo-Saxon law. From the first invasions of the Danes in 787, or from the end of the 8th century to the time of the Norman conquest in 1066, or nearly 300 years, the laws and usages of the Northmen had prevailed over this large portion of the island. This kingdom of Northumberland would, at the present day, be more populous and wealthy than either of the kingdoms of Sweden, Denmark, Hanover, Holland, Belgium, Saxony, or Wirtemburg, and had no doubt a proportional importance in those times. The Northmen, immediately previous to the Norman conquest, had conquered the whole of England, and held it from 1003 to 1041, for four successive reigns; viz. of Swein, Canute the Great, Harald Harefoot, and Hardicanute. In the laws of Edward the Confessor, as given by Lambart in 1568, and republished by Wheloch at the end of his edition of Bede, 1644, it is stated that for sixty-eight years previous to the Norman conquest, these Anglo-Saxon laws, originally framed by Edgar, had been out of use; and when William the Conqueror, in the fourth year of his reign, renewed these laws of Edward the Confessor, he was more inclined to retain the laws of the Northmen then in general use. If we strike off Wales, Cornwall, the western borders towards Scotland, and all comprehended in the kingdom of Northumberland, East Anglia, and other parts peopled by Northmen and their descendants, it is difficult to believe that the old Anglo-Saxon branch could have been predominant in the island, in numbers, power, and social influence; or could have prevailed to such an extent over the character and spirit of the population as to bury all social movement under the apathy and superstition in which they appear to have been sunk. The rebellions against William the Conqueror and his successors appear to have been almost always raised, or mainly supported, ​in the counties of recent Danish descent, not in those peopled by the old Anglo-Saxon race. The spirit and character of men having rights in society were undoubtedly renewed, and kept alive in England, by this great infusion into the population of people who had these rights, and the spirit and character produced by them, in their native land. A new and more vigorous branch was planted in the country than the old Anglo-Saxon. In historical research it is surely more reasonable to go to the nearest source of the institutions, laws, and spirit of a people—to the recent and great infusion into England from the north, during the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, of men bred up in a rude but vigorous exercise of their rights in legislation, and in all the acts of their government—than to the most remote, and to trace in the obscure hints of Tacitus of popular and free institutions existing a thousand years before in the forests of Germany, the origin of our parliaments, constitution, and national character. The German people, the true unmixed descendants of the old Saxon race whom Tacitus describes, never, from the earliest date in modern history to the present day, had a single hour of religious, civil, and political liberty, as nations, or as individuals,—never enjoyed the rights which the American citizen or the British subject, however imperfectly, enjoy in the freedom of person, property, and mind, at the present day, in their social condition. If the great stock itself of the Anglo-Saxon race has not transmitted to its immediate posterity in its own land the institutions of a free people, nor the spirit, character, independence of mind, on which alone they can be founded with stability, it appears absurd to trace to that stock our free institutions, and the principles in our character and spirit by which they are maintained, when we find a source so much nearer from which they would naturally flow. Our civil, religious, and political rights,—the principles, ​spirit, and forms of legislation through which they work in our social union, are the legitimate offspring of the Things of the Northmen, not of the Wittenagemoth of the Anglo-Saxons—of the independent Norse viking, not of the abject Saxon monk.
It would be a curious inquiry for the political philosopher to examine the causes which produced, in the 10th century, such a difference in the social condition of the Northmen, and of the cognate Anglo-Saxon branch in England and Germany. Physical causes connected with the nature of the country and climate, as well as the conventional causes of udal right, and the exclusion of inheritance by primogeniture, prevented the accumulation of land into large estates, and the rise of a feudal nobility like that of Germany. The following physical causes appear not only to have operated directly in preventing the growth of the feudal system in the country of the Northmen, but to have produced some of the conventional causes also which concurred to prevent it.
The Scandinavian peninsula consists of a vast table of mountain land, too elevated in general for cultivation, or even for the pasturage of large herds or flocks together in any one locality; and although sloping gently towards the Baltic or the Sound on the Swedish side, and there susceptible of the same inhabitation and husbandry as other countries, in as far as clime and soil will allow, on the other side,—the proper country of the Northmen,—throwing out towards the sea all round huge prongs of rocky and lofty ridges, either totally bare of soil, or covered with pine forests, growing apparently out of the very rock, and with no useful soil beneath them. The valleys and deep glens between these ridges, which shoot up into lofty pinnacles, precipices, and mountains, are filled at the lower end by the ocean, forming fiords, as these inlets of the sea are called, which run far up into the land, in some ​cases a hundred miles or more; yet so narrow that the stones, it is said, rolling down from the mountain slope on one side of such a fiord, are often projected from the steep overhanging precipice, in which the slope half-way down ends, across to the opposite shore. These fiords in general, however, are fine expanses or inland lakes of the ocean,—calm, deep, pure blue; and shut in on every side by black precipices and green forests, and with fair wooded islets sleeping on the bosom of the water. These fiords are the peculiar and characteristic feature of Norwegian scenery. Rivers of great volume of water, but generally of short and rapid course, pour into the fiords from the Fielde, or high table-land behind, which forms the body or mass of the country. It is on the flat spots of arable land on the borders of these fiords, rivers, and the lakes into which the rivers expand, that the population lives. In some of these river-valleys and sea-valleys, a single farm of a few acres of land is only found here and there in many miles of country, the bare rock dipping at once into the blue deep water, and leaving no margin for cultivation. In others, narrow slips of inhabitable arable land extend some way, but are hemmed in behind, on the land side, by the rocky ridges which form the valley; and they are seldom broad enough to admit of two rows of little farms, or even of two large fields, in the breadth between the hill-foot and the water; and in the length are often interrupted by some bare prong of rock jutting from the side-ridge into the slip of arable level land, and dividing it from such another slip. All the land capable of cultivation, either with spade or plough, has been cultivated from the most remote times; and there is little room for improvement, because it is the ground-rock destitute of soil, not merely trees or loose rocks encumbering the soil, that opposes human industry. The little estates, not averaging ​perhaps fifty acres each of arable land, are densely inhabited; because the seasons for preparing the ground, sowing, and reaping, are so brief, that all husbandry work must be performed in the shortest possible time, and consequently at the expense of supporting, all the year, a great many hands on the farm to perform it; and the fishing in the fiord, river, or lake, the summer pasturage for cattle in the distant fielde-glens attached to each little estate in the inhabited country, and a little wood-cutting in the forest, afford subsistence to many more people than the little farm itself would require for its cultivation in a better clime, or could support from its own produce. The extent of every little property has been settled for ages, and want of soil and space prevents any alteration in the extent, and keeps it within the unchangeable boundaries of rock and water. It is highly interesting to look at these original little family estates of the men who, in the 9th and 10th centuries, played so important a part in the finest countries of Europe,—who were the origin of the men and events we see at this day, and whose descendants are now seated on the thrones and in the palaces of Europe, and in the West are making a new world of social arrangements for themselves. The sites, and even the names, of the little estates or guards on which these men were born, remain unchanged, in many instances, to this day; and the posterity of the original proprietors of the 9th century may reasonably be supposed, in a country in which the land is entailed by udal right upon the family, to be at this day the possessors—engaged, however, now in cutting wood for the French or Newcastle market, instead of in conquering Normandy and Northumberland. Some of our great English nobility and gentry leave their own splendid seats, parks, and estates in England, to enjoy shooting and fishing in Norway for ​a few weeks. They are little aware that they are perhaps passing by the very estates which their own ancestors once ploughed,—sleeping on the same spot of this earth on which their forefathers, a thousand years ago, slept, and were at home; men, too, as proud then of their high birth, of their descent, through some seven-and-twenty generations, from Odin, or his followers the Godar, as their posterity are now of having "come in with or before the Conqueror." The common traveller visiting this land destitute of architectural remains of former magnificence, without the temples and classical ruins of Italy, or the cathedrals and giant castles of Germany, will yet feel here that the memorials of former generations may be materially insignificant, yet morally grand. These little farms and houses, as they stand at this day, were the homes of men whose rude, but just and firm sense of their civil and political rights in society, is, in the present times, radiating from the spark of it they kindled in England, and working out in every country the emancipation of mankind from the thraldom of the institutions which grew up under the Roman empire, and still cover Italy and Germany, along with the decaying ruins of the splendour, taste, magnificence, power, and oppression of their rulers. Europe holds no memorials of ancient historical events which have been attended by such great results in our times, as some rude excavations in the shore-banks of the island of Vigr, in Möre,—which are pointed out by the finger of tradition as the dry docks in which the vessels of Rolf Ganger, from whom the fifth in descent was our William the Conqueror, were drawn up in winter, and from whence he launched them, and set out from Norway on the expedition in which he conquered Normandy. The philosopher might seat himself be​side the historian amidst the ruins of the Capitol, and with Rome, and all the monuments of Roman power and magnificence under his eye, might venture to ask whether they, magnificent and imposing as they are, suggest ideas of greater social interest,—are connected with grander moral results on the condition, well-being, and civilisation of the human race in every land, than these rude excavations in the isle of Vigr, which once held Rolf Ganger's vessels.
It is evident that such a country in such a climate never could have afforded a rent, either in money or in natural products, for the use of the land, to a class of feudal nobility possessing it in great estates, although it may afford a subsistence to a class of small working landowners, like the bonders, giving their own labour to the cultivation, and helping out their agricultural means of living with the earnings of their labour in other occupations—in piracy and pillage on the coasts of other countries in the 9th century, and in the 19th with the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the wood trade, and other peaceful occupations of industry. On account of these physical circumstances—of a soil and climate which afford no surplus produce from land, after subsisting the needful labourers, to go as rent to a landlord—no powerful body of feudal nobility could grow up in Norway, as in other countries in the middle ages; and from the same causes, now in modern times, during the 400 years previous to 1814 in which Denmark had held Norway, all the encouragement that could be given by the Danish government to raising a class of nobility in Norway was unavailing. Slavery even could not exist in any country in which the labour of the slave would barely produce the subsistence of the slave, and would leave no surplus gain from his labour for a master; still less could a nobility, or body of great landowners drawing rent, subsist where land can barely ​produce subsistence for the labour which, in consequence of the shortness of the seasons, is required in very large quantity, in proportion to the area, for its cultivation. We find, accordingly, that when the viking trade, the occupation of piracy and pillage, was extinguished by the influence of Christianity, the progress of civilisation, the rise of the Hanseatic League and of its establishments, which in Norway itself both repressed piracy and gave beneficial occupation in the fisheries to the surplus population formerly occupied in piracy and warfare, that class of people fell back upon husbandry and ordinary occupations which had formerly been engaged all summer and autumn in marauding expeditions; and the class of slaves, the thralls, was necessarily superseded in their utility by people living at home all the year. The last piratical expeditions were about the end of the 12th century, and in the following century thraldom, or slavery, was, it is understood, abolished by law by Magnus the Law Improver. The labour of the slave was no longer needed at home, and would not pay the cost of his subsistence.
Physical circumstances also, and not conventional or accidental circumstances, evidently moulded the other social arrangements of the Northmen into a shape different from the feudal. The Things or assemblies of the people, which kings had to respect and refer to, may be deduced much more reasonably from natural causes similar to those which prevented the rise of a feudal class of nobles in Norway, than from political institutions or principles of social arrangement carried down from the ancient Germans in a natural state of liberty in remote ages. The same causes will produce the same effects in all ages. It is refining too much in political antiquarianism to refer all liberal social arrangements—our English parliaments, our constitutional checks upon the executive ​power in the state, our popular representation, and the spirit of our laws—to the Wittenagemoths of the Saxons, and to trace these again up to principles of freedom in social arrangement derived from the Germanic tribes in the days of Tacitus. But it is not refining too much to conclude that, in every age and country, there are but two ways in which the governing class of a community can issue their laws, commands, or will, to the governed. One is through writing, and by the arts of writing and reading being so generally diffused that in every locality one individual at least, the civil functionary or the parish priest, is able to communicate the law, command, or will of the governing, to that small group of the governed over which he is placed. The other way, and the only way where, from the nature of the soil and climate, the governed are widely scattered, and writing and reading are rarely attained, and such civil or clerical arrangement not efficient, was to convene Things or general assemblies of the people, at which the law, command, or will of the governing could be made known to the governed. There could be no other way, in poor thinly-inhabited countries especially, by which the governing, however despotic, could get their law, command, or will done; for these must be made known to be executed or obeyed, whether they were for a levy of men or of money, for war or for peace, for rewarding and honouring, or for punishing and disgracing—the law, command, or will must be promulgated. Nor is it refining too much to conclude, that wheresoever men are assembled together in numbers for public business, be it merely to hear the law, command, or will of a despotic ruler, the spirit of deliberating upon, considering, and judging of the decree given out, and of the public interests involved in it, is there in the midst of them. The democratic element of society is there,—the spirit ​of judging in their own affairs is there, and is let loose; for such an assembly is in effect a parliament, in which public opinion will make itself heard; and coming from the only military force of those ages, the mass of the people, and, in the North, of a people without military subordination to a feudal aristocracy in civil affairs, must predominate over the will of the king supported only by his court retinue. The concurrence of a few great nobles could not here give effect to the royal command, law, or will; because the few, the intermediate link of a powerful aristocracy, which to this day chains the Anglo-Saxon race on the Continent, was from physical causes—the poverty of the soil—totally wanting among the Northmen, and the kings had to deal direct with the people in great general assemblies or Things. The necessity of holding such general meetings or Things for announcing to the people the levies of men, ships, and provisions required of them, and for all public business, and the check given by the Things to all measures not approved of by the public judgment, appear in every page of the Heimskringla, and constitute its great value, in fact, to us, as a record of the state of social arrangement among our ancestors. The necessity of assembling the people was so well established, that we find no public act whatsoever undertaken without the deliberation of a Thing; and the principle was so engrafted in the spirit of the people, that even the attack of an enemy, the course to be taken in dangerous circumstances, to retreat or advance, were laid before a Thing of all the people in the fleet or army; and they often referred it to the king's own judgment, that is, the king took authority from the Thing to act in the emergency on his own plan and judgment. A reference to the people in all that concerned them was interwoven with the daily life of the Northmen, in peace and in war. We read of House Things, of ​Court Things, of District Things for administering law, of Things for consultation of all engaged in an expedition; and in all matters, and on all occasions, in which men were embarked with common interests, a reference to themselves, a universal spirit of self-government in society, was established. King Swerrer, who reigned from 1177 to 1203, after the period when Snorro Sturleson's work ends, although taking his own way in his military enterprises, appears in a saga of his reign never to have omitted calling a Thing, and bringing it round by his speeches, which are often very characteristic, to his own opinion and plans.
So essential were Things considered wheresoever men were acting with a common stake and interest, that in war expeditions the call to a Thing on the war-horn or trumpet appears to have been a settled signal-call known to all men,—like the call to arms, or the call to attack; and each kind of Thing, whether it was a general Thing that was summoned, or a House Thing of the king's counsellors, or a Herd Thing of the court, or of the leaders of the troops, appears to have had its distinct peculiar call on the war-horn known to all men. In the ordinary affairs of the country, the Things were assembled in a simple and effective way. A bod, called a budstikke in Norway, where it is still used, was a stick of wood like a constable's baton, with a spike at the end of it, which was passed from house to house, as a signal for the people to assemble. In each house it was well known to which neighbouring house it had to be passed, and the penalties for detaining the bod were very heavy. In modern times, the place, house, and occasion of meeting, are stated on a slip of paper inclosed in the bottom of the budstick; but in former times the Thing-place, and the time allowed for repairing there, were known, and whether to go armed or unarmed was the only matter requiring to be indi​cated. An arrow split into four parts was the known token for appearing in arms. If the people of a house to which the token was carried were from home, and the door locked, the bearer had to stick it on the door by the spike inserted in one end for this purpose; if the door was open, but the people not at home, the bearer had "to stick it in the house-father's great chair at the fireside;" and this was to be held a legal delivery of the token, exonerating the last bearer from the penalties for detaining it. The peace token, a simple stick with a spike; the war token, an arrow split into quarters, and sent out in different directions; a token in shape of an axe, to denote the presence of the king at the Thing; and one in shape of the cross, to denote that church matters were to be considered,—are understood to have been used before writing and reading were diffused. On one occasion, we read of Earl Hakon issuing the usual token for the bonders to meet him at a Thing; and it was exchanged, in its course, for the war token, and the bonders appeared in arms, and overpowered the Earl and his attendants.
The Things appear not to have been representative, but primary assemblies, of all the bonders of the district udal-born to land. In Sweden there appears to have been one general Thing held at Upsal, at the time when the festivals or sacrifices to Thor, Odin, and Friggia were celebrated. From the proceedings of one of the Things held at Upsal in February or March, 1018, related in the Saga of Saint Olaf, we may have some idea of the power of those assemblies. King Olaf of Sweden, who had a great dislike to Olaf King of Norway, was forced by this Thing to conclude a peace with, and give his daughter in marriage to, King Olaf of Norway, in order to put an end to hostilities between the two countries; and they threatened, by their lagman, to depose him for misgovernment, if ​he refused the treaty and alliance which King Olaf of Norway proposed by his ambassador Hialte the Scald. The lagman appears to have been the depositary and expounder of the laws passed by the Things, and to have been either appointed by the people as their president at the Things, or to have held his office by hereditary succession from the godar, and to have been priest and judge, exercising both the religious and judicial function. At this general Thing at Upsal the lagman of the district of Upland was entitled to preside; and his influence and power in this national assembly appear to have been much greater than the king's. It is a picturesque circumstance, mentioned in the Saga of Saint Olaf about this Thing at Upsal in 1018, that when Thrognyr the lagman rose after the ambassador from Norway had delivered his errand, and the Swedish king had replied to it, mil the bonders, who had been sitting on the grass before, rose up, and crowded together to hear what their lagman Thrognyr was going to say; and the old lagman, whose white and silky beard is stated to have been so long that it reached his knees when he was seated, allowed the clanking of their arms and the din of their feet to subside before he began his speech. The Things appear to have been always held in the open air, and the people were seated; and the speakers, even the kings, rose up to address them. In the characters of great men given in the sagas we always find eloquence, ready agreeable speaking, a good voice, a quick apprehension, a ready delivery, and winning manners, reckoned the highest qualities of a popular king or eminent chief. His talent as a public speaker is never omitted. In Sweden this one general Thing appears to have been for the whole country; and besides the religious or civil business, a kind of fair for exchanging; commodities arose from the concourse of people to it from all parts of the country. ​In Norway,—owing no doubt to the much greater difference in the means of subsistence in the different quarters of the country, in some of which fishing-grounds out at sea, and even rocks abounding in sea-fowl eggs at the season, were subjects of property; in others pasturages in distant mountain glens, and in others arable lands only, are of importance,—four distinct Things appear in the oldest times to have been necessary for framing laws suitable to the different circumstances of their respective jurisdictions; and, within their jurisdictions, the smaller district Things appear to have determined law cases between parties according to the laws settled at the great Things; and as the mulcts or money penalties paid for all crimes went partly to the king, and were an important branch of the royal revenue, the kings, on their progresses through the land, with the lagman of each district, appear to have held these Things for administering justice and collecting their revenue. The king's bailiff, or the tacksman or donatory of the revenue of the district, appears to have held these Law Things in the king's absence. The great Things appear to have been legislative, and the small district Things within their circle of jurisdiction administrative. Of the great Things there were in old times four in different quarters of Norway. The Froste Thing was held in the Drontheim country, at a farm called Lagten, in the present bailiwick of Frosten; Gule Thing, at Evindwick, in the shiprath of Gule, on the west coast of Norway; Eidsivia Thing, at Eidsvold, in Upper Raumerige, for the inland or upland districts of Norway; and Borgar Thing, at the old burgh called Sarpsborg, on the river Glommen, near the great waterfall called Sarpsfors. One or two other Law Things appear to have been added in later times: one in Halogaland for the people living far north, and one on the coast between the jurisdiction or circle of the ​Sarpsborg Thing and that of the Gule Thing. A special Thing, called the Ore Thing, from being held on the Ore, Aar, or isthmus of the river Nid, on which the city of Drontheim stands, was considered the only Thing which could confer the sovereignty of the whole of Norway, the other Things having no right to powers beyond their own circles. It was only convened for this special purpose of examining and proclaiming the right to the whole kingdom; and it appears to have been only the kingship de jure that the Ore Thing considered and confirmed: the king had still to repair to each Law Thing and small Thing, to obtain their acknowledgment of his right, and the power of a sovereign within their jurisdictions. The scatt or land-tax,—the right of guest-quarters or subsistence on royal progresses,—the levy of men, ships, provisions, arms, for defence at home, or war expeditions abroad, had to be adjudged to the kings by the Things; and amidst the perpetual contests between udal-born claimants, the principle of referring to the Things for the right and power of a sovereign, and for the title of king, was never set aside. No class but the bonders appeared at Things with any power. The kings themselves appear to have been but Thingmen at a Thing.
Two circumstances, which may be called accidental, concurred with the physical circumstances of the country, soil, and clime, to prevent the rise of a feudal nobility in Norway at the period, the 9th century, when feudality was establishing itself over the rest of Europe. One was the colonisation of Iceland by that class which in other countries became feudal lords; the other was the conquests in England and in France, by leaders who drew off all of the same ​class of more warlike habits than the settlers in Iceland, and opened a more promising field for their ambition abroad in those expeditions, than in struggling at home against the supremacy of Harald Haarfager. In his successful attempt to reduce all the small kings, or district kings, under his authority, he was necessarily thrown upon the people for support, and their influence would be naturally increased by the suppression through their aid of the small independent kings. This struggle was renewed at intervals until the introduction of Christianity by King Olaf the Saint; and the two parties appear to have supported the two different religions: the small kings and their party adhering to the old religion of Odin, under which the small kings, as godars, united the offices of judge and priest, and levied certain dues, and presided at the sacrificial meetings as judges as well as priests; and the other party, which included the mass of the people, supported Christianity, and the supremacy of King Olaf, because it relieved them from the exactions of the local kings, and from internal war and pillage. The influence of the people, and of their Things, gained by the removal to other countries of that class which at home would have grown probably into a feudal aristocracy. In Iceland an aristocratic republic was at first established, and in Normandy and Northumberland all that was aristocratic in Norway found an outlet for its activity.
A physical circumstance also almost peculiar to Norway, and apparently very little connected with the social state of a people, was of great influence, in concurrence with those two accidental circumstances, in preventing the rise of an aristocracy. The stone of the Peninsula in general, and of Norway in particular, is gneiss, or other hard primary rock, which is worked with difficulty, and breaks up in rough shapeless lumps, or in thin schistose plates; and walls ​cannot be constructed of such building materials without great labour, time, and command of cement. Limestone is not found in abundance in Norway, and is rare in situations in which it can be made and easily transported; and even clay, which is used as a bedding or cement in some countries for rough lumps of stone in thick walls, is scarce in Norway. Wood has of necessity, in all times and with all classes, been the only building material. This circumstance has been of great influence in the middle ages on the social condition of the Northmen. Castles of nobles or kings, commanding the country round, and secure from sudden assault by the strength of the building, could not be constructed, and never existed in Norway. The huge fragments and ruins of baronial castles and strongholds, so characteristic of the state of society in the middle ages in the feudal countries of Europe, and so ornamental in the landscape now, are wanting in Norway. The noble had nothing to fall back upon but his war-ship, the king nothing but the support of the people. In the reign of our King Stephen, when England was covered with the fortified castles of the nobility, to the number, it is somewhere stated, of 1500, and was laid waste by their exactions and private wars, the sons of Harald Gille—the kings Sigurd, Inge, and Eystein — were referring their claims and disputes to the decision of Things of the people. In Normandy and England the Northmen and their descendants felt the want in their mother-country of secure fortresses for their power; and the first and natural object of the alien landholders was to build castles, and lodge themselves in safety by stone walls against sudden assaults, and above all against the firebrand of the midnight assailant. In the mother-country, to be surprised and burned by night within the wooden structures in which even kings had to reside, was a fate so common, that some of the kings ​appeared to have lived on board ships principally, or on islands on the coast.
This physical circumstance of wanting the building material of which the feudal castles of other countries were constructed, and by which structures the feudal system itself was mainly supported, had its social as well as political influences on the people. The different classes were not separated from each other, in society, by the important distinction of a difference in the magnitude or splendour of their dwellings. The peasant at the corner of the forest could, with his time, material, and labour of his family at command, lodge himself as magnificently as the king,—and did so. The mansions of kings and great chiefs were no better than the ordinary dwellings of the bonders. Lade, near Drontheim,—the seat of kings before the city of Drontheim, or Nidaros, was founded by King Olaf Tryggvesson, and which was the mansion of Earl Hakon the Great, and of many distinguished men who were earls of Lade,—was, and is, a wooden structure of the ordinary dimensions of the houses of the opulent bonders in the district. Egge—the seat of Kalf Arneson, who led the bonder army against King Olaf which defeated and slew him at the battle of Stikkleslad, and who was a man of great note and social importance in his day—is, and always has been, such a farm-house of logs as may be seen on every ordinary farm estate of the same size. The foundation of a few loose stones, on which the lower tier of logs is laid to raise it from the earth, remains always the same, although all the superstructure of wood may have been often renewed; but these show the extent on the ground of the old houses. The equality of all ranks in those circumstances of lodging, food, clothing, fuel, furniture, which form great social distinctions among people of other countries, must have nourished a feeling of independence of external cir​circumstances,—a feeling, also, of their own worth, rights, and importance, among the bonders,—and must have raised their habits, character, and ideas to a nearer level to those of the highest. The kings, having no royal residences, were lodged, with their court attendants on the royal progresses, habitually by the bonders, and entertained by them. At the present day there are no royal mansions, or residences of the great, in Norway, different from the ordinary houses of the bonders or peasant-proprietors. His Majesty Carl Johan has to lodge in their houses in travelling through his Norwegian dominions; and no king in Europe could travel through his kingdom, and be lodged so well every night by the same class. In ancient times the kings lived in guest-quarters,—that is, by billet upon the peasant-proprietors in different districts in regular turn; and even this kind of intercourse must have kept alive a high feeling of their own importance in the bonder class, in the times when, from the want of the machinery of a lettered functionary class, civil or clerical, all public business had to be transacted directly with them in their Things. The rise and diffusion of letters, learning, and a learned class, in the middle ages, retarded perhaps rather than advanced just principles of government and legislation. The people were more enslaved by the power which the learning of the middle ages threw into the hands of their rulers, than they were before in the ages of ignorance of letters, when their rude force was in direct contact, face to face, with the rude power of their rulers. This prejudicial effect of the revival of letters on civil, political, and religious liberty, by doing away with all direct vivâ voce communication in assemblies of the people between the rulers and the ruled, may be traced even to the present day in Germany and other countries. The people have no influence in their own concerns, because a ​lettered body of functionaries, spread over the whole social body, and fixed in every locality, receives, and disseminates to the small groups of the population nnder their jurisdiction, the law, command, or will of the autocratic government, without that reference to the people which could not be avoided when all had to be convened in a Thing or assembly to hear the promulgation. The period in which the influence of the governed should have been made effective slipped by on the Continent, among the Anglo-Saxon race, without being used; and probably would have slipped by in England also, but for the recent admixture of a wilder, more ignorant, and more free people, in a great proportion of the island, who conld not even be oppressed without collecting them into Things, or Eolkmoths, to make known to them what they had to submit to. The very ignorance of the half pagan people of mixed or pure Danish descent who occupied so large a portion of the island at the Norman conquest, was the providential means of keeping alive that spirit of self-government in public affairs among the people, on which, and not on the mere forms of representative government, our social economy rests. The forms are useless without the life in the spirit of the people to animate them. France, and some countries of Germany, have got the moulds; but the stuff to fill them with is wanting in the people. We inherit this stuff in the national character from the great inter-mixture of the rude energetic Northmen, bred up in Things and consultations with their leaders, which took place during the Danish conquest immediately previous to the invasion of William the Conqueror; and in the generation immediately after his conquest this stuff began to show itself in fermentation, and worked out our present social institutions, and the spirit of our national character.
The lendermen, or tacksmen of the king's farms ​and revenues, could scarcely be called a class. They were temporary functionaries, not hereditary nobles; and had no feudal rights or jurisdiction, but had to plead in the Things like other bonders. As individuals they appear to have obtained power and influence, but not as a class; and they never transmitted it to their posterity.
The earls, or jarls, were still less than the lender-men a body of nobility approaching to the feudal barons of other lands. The title appears to have been altogether personal; not connected with property in land, or any feudal rights or jurisdiction. The Earls of Orkney—of the family of Rognvald Earl of More, the friend of Harald Haarfager, and father of Rolf Ganger—appear to have been the only family of hereditary nobles under the Norwegian crown exercising a kind of feudal power. The Earls of More appear to have been only functionaries or lendermen collecting the king's taxes, and managing the royal lands in the district, and retaining a part for their remuneration. The Earls of Orkney, however, of the first line, appear to have grown independent, and to have paid only military service, and a nominal quit-rent, and only when forced to do so. This line appears to have been broken in upon in 1129, when Bala, the son of Koll, was made earl, under the name of Earl Rognvald. His father Koll was married to the sister of Earl Magnus the Saint; but the direct male descendants of the old line, the sons of Earl Magnus's brothers, appear not to have been extinct. In Norway, from the time of Earl Hakon of Lade, who was regent or viceroy for the Danish kings when they expelled the Norwegian descendants of Haarfager, there appears to have been a jealousy of conferring the title of earl, as it probably implied some of Earl Hakon's power in the opinion of the people. Harald Haarfager had appointed sixteen earls, one ​for each district, when he suppressed the small kings; hut they appear to have been merely collectors of his rents.
The churchmen were not a numerous or powerful class until after the first half of the 12th century. They were at first strangers, and many of them English. Nicolas Breakspear, the son, Matthew Paris tell us, of a peasant employed about the Benedictine monastery of Saint Albans in Hertfordshire, and educated by the monks there, was the first priest who obtained any political or social influence in Norway. He was sent there, when cardinal, on a mission to settle the church; and afterwards, when elected pope, 1154, under the title of Hadrian IV., he was friendly to the Norwegian people. His influence when in Norway was beneficially exerted in preventing the carrying of arms, or engaging in private feuds, during certain periods of truce proclaimed by the church. The body of priests in the peninsula until the end of the 12th century being small, and mostly foreigners from England, both in Sweden and in Norway, shows the want of education in Latin and in the use of letters among: the pagan Northmen; and shows also the identity or similarity of the language of a great portion at least of England with that of the Scandinavian peninsula.
Several of the smaller institutions in society, which were transplanted into England by the Northmen or their successors, may perhaps be traced to the mode of living which the physical circumstances of the mothercountry had produced. The kings having, in fact, no safe resting place but on board of ship, being in perpetual danger, during their progresses for subsistence on shore, to be surprised and burnt in their quarters by any trifling force, had no reluctance at all to such expeditions against England, the Hebrides, or the Orkney Islands, as they frequently undertook; and ​when on shore, and from necessity subsisting in guest-quarters in inland districts, we see the first rudiments of the institution of a standing army, or body guard, or body of hired men-at-arms. The kings, from the earliest times, appear to have kept a herd, as it was called, or court. The herdmen were paid men-at-arms; and it appears incidentally from several passages in the sagas that they regularly mounted guard,—posted sentries round the king's quarters,—and had patroles on horseback, night and day, at some distance, to bring notice of any hostile advance. We find that Olaf Kyrre, or the Quiet, kept a body of 120 herdmen, 60 giesters, and 60 house-carls, for doing such work as might be required. The standing armed force, or body guard, appears to have consisted of two classes of people. The herdmen were apparently of the class udal-born to land, and consequently entitled to sit in Things at home; for they are called Thing-men, which appears to have been a title of distinction. The giester appears to have been a soldier of the unfree class; that is, not of those udal-born to land, and free of, or qualified to sit in, the Things. They appear to have been the common seamen, soldiers, and followers; for we do not find any mention of slaves ever employed under arms in any way, or in any war expeditions. The giesters appear to have been inferior to the thingmen or herdmen, as we find them employed in inferior otfices, such as executing criminals or prisoners. The victories of Swein, and Canute the Great, are ascribed to the superiority of the hired bands of thingmen in their pay. The massacre of the Danes in 1002, by Ethelred, appears to have been of the regular bands of thingmen who were quartered in the towns, and who were attacked while unarmed I and attending a church festival. The herdmen appear not only to have been disciplined and paid troops, but to have been clothed uniformly. Red was always ​the national colour of the Northmen, and continues still in Denmark and England the distinctive colour of their military dress. It was so of the herdmen and people of distinction in Norway, as appears from several parts of the sagas, in the 11th century. Olaf Kyrre, or the Quiet, appears to have introduced, in this century, some court ceremonies or observances not used before. For each guest at the royal table he appointed a torch-bearer, to hold a candle. The butler stood in front of the king's table to fill the cups, which, we are told,.before his time were of deer's horn. The court-marshal had a table, opposite to the king's, for entertaining guests of inferior dignity. The drinking was either by measure, or without measure; that is, in each horn or cup there was a perpendicular row of studs at equal distances, and each guest when the cup or horn was passed to him drank down to the stud or mark below. At night, and on particular occasions, the drinking was without measure, each taking what he pleased; and to be drunk at night appears to have been common even for the kings. Such cups with studs are still preserved in museums, and in families of the bonders. The kings appear to have wanted no external ceremonial belonging to their dignity. They were addressed in forms, still preserved in the northern languages, of peculiar respect; their personal attendants were of the highest people, and were considered as holding places of great honour. Earl Magnus the Saint was, in his youth, one of those who carried in the dishes to the royal table; and torch-bearers, herdmen, and all who belonged to the court, were in great consideration; and it appears to have been held of importance, and of great advantage, to be enrolled among the king's herdmen.
We may assume from the above observations, derived from the facts and circumstances stated in various parts of the Heimskringla, that the intellectual ​and political condition of this branch of the Saxon race, while it was pagan, was not very inferior to, although very different from, that of the Anglo-Saxon branch which had been Christianised five hundred years before, and had among them the learning and organisation of the church of Rome. They had a literature of their own; a language common to all, and in which that literature was composed; laws, institutions, political arrangements, in which public opinion was powerful; and had the elements of freedom and constitutional government. What may have been the comparative diffusion of the useful arts in the two branches in those ages? The test of the civilisation of a people, next to their intellectual and civil condition, is the state of the useful arts among them.
* ↑ Bondi (in the plural bænder) does not suit the English ear, and there is no reasoning with the ear in matters of language. Bonder, although it be plural, is therefore used singularly; and bonders, although it be a double plural, to express more than one of the bondi. The word itself, bondi or buandir, seems derived from bu, a country dwelling; and signifying also the stock, wealth, affairs, and all that belongs to husbandry. The word bu is still retained in Orkney and Shetland, to express the principal farm and farm-house of a small township or property, the residence of the proprietor; and is used in Denmark and Norway to express stock, or farm stock and substance.
* ↑ Vigroe, the isle of Vigr, is situated in Haram parish, in the bailiwick of Soud Mör.—Strohm's Biskryvelse over Möre, and Kraft's Norge.
* ↑ The narrow slip of land between two waters, as at a river mouth or outlet of a lake, between it and the sea, is still called an Are or Ayre in the north of Scotland, and is the same as the Icelandic Ore.