Øye (Ingvild)_Agricultural Conditions and Rural Societies CA. 800-1350. an Introduction

Ingvild Øye

Farming systems and rural

societies ca. 800–1350

Kap. 2 – Ingvild Øye 18-06-04 11:31 Side 79

Agricultural conditions and rural

societies ca. 800–1350 – an introduction

On account of the roughness of its mountains and the immoderatecold, Norway is the most unproductive of all countries, suited onlyfor herds ... Poverty has forced them thus to go all over the worldand from piratical raids bring home in great abundance the richesof the land. In this way they bear up under the unfruitfulness oftheir own country (Adam of Bremen).1

Two adjectives spring to mind at the start of an overview ofNorwegian farming and rural life in the Viking period and theMiddle Ages – poor and remote; just as stated by Adam of Bremenin the 1070s. Norway’s situation on the northern fringes of Europeand its tough physical environment made it a distant and harshregion in the eyes of foreigners further south. Sedentary settlementwas fragmented and limited in extent by vast tracts of mountainousterrain, forests, moors, swampland, lakes and tarns. Until the pre-sent day hardly more than 3 per cent of the total land mass has beenunder cultivation.2

Compared with the neighbouring countries and more southerlyparts of Europe, Norway’s broken topography and lack of arableland may easily create the impression that its farming systems andrural societies have been equally and uniformly atypical. However,in this representation the considerable regional differences withinthe country will be emphasized and similarities with other NorthEuropean countries considered. Although Norwegian farming mayseem comparatively marginal in a European perspective more nuan-ces and broader complexity will emerge from closer inspection.

As the country stretches across thirteen degrees of latitude, cli-matic conditions vary considerably between the north and southand also between the coast and inland areas, lowland and highland.Generally the climate was somewhat warmer and dryer in the

Ingvild Øye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 800–1350

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Previous page:Adam digs and Eve spins.Detail of the vaulting fromÅl stave church. Late thir-teenth century. Now in theUniversity Museum ofCultural Heritage, Oslo.


Viking and Middle Ages than it is today, with an optimum in ca.950–1200.3 As it still does, the wind-driven Gulf Stream broughtwarm air and warm waters to the western and north-western coast,reducing the temperature difference between southern and nor-thern coastal districts and making grain-growing possible as farnorth as around 70° N.4 Generally, the more sheltered inner areas ofthe fjord districts of western and northern Norway had a dryer cli-mate than the coastal areas, with warmer summers and colder win-ters, and this was also the case in the inland areas of eastern Norway(Østlandet), sheltered as they were from the humid westerly windsby the high mountain range that separates them from westernNorway (Vestlandet).

Topographically, the agricultural landscape varied greatly, fromthe relatively wide areas of comparatively flat land with fertilemarine and moraine deposits in south-eastern and centralØstlandet and in central Norway (Trøndelag) to the more unevenand limited pockets of glacial and post-glacial deposits to be foundalong the rest of the coast, by the fjords and in the valleys stretchingfrom sea to mountains. At the south-western fringe of Vestlandet

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0 50 100 150 km

Vegetation regions

Cultivated areas

The boreal region with coniferous forests and mountain birch belt

The mountain region

Lofoten

Vesterålen

Vegetation regions inNorway.(Adapted fromKunnskapsforlagets storeNorgesatlas)


the unique moraine plain of Jæren, comprising 700 square kilome-tres, stands out from the more broken coastal landscape to thenorth and south-east (cf. map p. 129). Outside the arable land eve-rywhere there were reserves of pasture on more barren soils or inareas climatically unsuitable for grain-growing; they were particu-larly abundant in the northern and western parts of the countryand generally in elevated terrain.5

In the course of the half millennium or so from ca. 800 to theBlack Death in 1349–50 the rural landscape was influenced by peo-ple interacting with it to suit their economic and social needs.There was a fundamental interplay between population growthand settlement expansion with extensive clearing of cultivable landand pastures, a process that was also affected by far-reachingchanges at other levels of society. A surplus from farming was anecessary condition for the process of territorial unification underkings with national ambitions that started in the late ninth centu-ry, and the building up of a political organization that could bindthe kingdom together. Closely connected with this process was thelater conversion to Christianity with the establishment of a churchorganization and the emergence of the first Norwegian towns,equally dependent on the royal initiative and the yield from far-ming. These processes continued throughout the rest of the periodunder consideration. They contributed significantly to shaping asystem of rights over land that changed the structure of medievalrural society and influenced the development of farming. These areall factors that will have to be taken into consideration in the fol-lowing overview.

Here the concept of farming will be applied in a wide sense,comprising both arable farming and animal husbandry, and takinginto consideration related economic activities by which the farmingpopulation exploited other resources of the land and sea.Additionally, the unifying concept of farming system will be used todenote the interplay of factors such as land use, organization of theresource areas, farming methods, environmental aspects, ownershipand management.6

The sources of farming and farming systems in the periodunder consideration are still to a large part unwritten, comprisingvaried archaeological finds, remains of farming structures andpractices above and under ground, palaeobotanical and zoologicalmaterial, topography etc. However, the research situation is greatlyimproved by the fact that Norway in the late Viking period andearly Middle Ages started to enter the world of script. A moreabundant body of written historical evidence is preserved from thefollowing high Middle Ages. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries

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saw the recording in writing of a rich historical literature andimportant law codes in Norway and Iceland, shedding light oncontemporary as well as past events and conditions, and from thelate thirteenth century recorded evidence becomes important. Thefollowing representation will make use of most types of extantwritten material, also the runic inscriptions that preceded the useof script in the Latin alphabet.

Particularly important for the development of farming andrural society are the place names that now appear in their oldestknown forms, and the provisions of the law codes. The latter are notonly normative; they also describe or reflect factual conditions, andtheir more programmatic regulations can be compared with thepractices revealed by the increasingly important record material.

Two generations of medieval Norwegian legal codes have beenpreserved: first, provincial codes that largely reflect the legal situati-on of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries but also containprovisions dating further back; second, national codes from the1270s. In the following decades the latter were amended and sup-plemented by royal regulations. Thus, it is possible to establish arough legal chronology for the period ca. 1100–1350 with elementsof even older legal situations. Two of the Norwegian provincial lawcodes have been preserved more or less completely, the GulathingLaw of western Norway and the Frostathing Law of Trøndelag, reve-aling differences in the farming systems and rural societies of thetwo regions, whereas not much more than the sections of Christianlaws remain of the east Norwegian codes of Eidsivathing (for theinner part of Østlandet) and Borgarthing (for the Oslofjord area).Extensive revisions of the provincial codes started in the mid-thir-teenth century, ultimately resulting in the national rural code of1274, the so-called Landlaw, which brought together provisions ofthe various provincial codes and new regulations.7

Altogether, there is more than sufficient evidence to substantiateprofound changes in Norwegian rural society ca. 800–1350. Yetthere has long been a tendency to regard farming and farming sys-tems as more or less static in the same period. This has fostered theneo-Malthusian notion of a population that in the high MiddleAges outgrew its means of sustenance; there was little agriculturalinnovation in order to keep up with the population growth. Whatthere is of justification for this view should be investigated with aview to the more optimistic gist of Ester Boserup’s studies, namelythat there will often be a positive correlation between populationdensity and agricultural productivity.8 We can now turn to thequestion of innovation and change versus conservatism and stabili-ty, which will be discussed as a main problem.

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Land rights

Land rights is a critical factor in most agricultural systems – oftenin the form of more permanent ownership of land and the more orless time-limited right to use it. How the two relate to each other isusually indicative of social stratification and inequality. A series offar-reaching changes in land ownership and rights of use occurredin Norway ca. 800–1350, as part of the general societal developmentoutlined above.

Distribution of ownership of land

The distribution of ownership of land cannot be roughly assesseduntil the first half of the fourteenth century. By combining contem-porary evidence with inferences drawn from later records, landregisters, tax-lists and the like (so-called ‘regressive method’) it hasbeen estimated that the Church owned about 40 per cent of the landin present-day Norway in terms of taxable value, the secular aristo-cracy in the king’s service about 20 per cent, and the Crown about7 per cent, while the remaining 33 per cent was in the hands of free-holders meaning that they owned their own land.9

Freehold land was mostly found in more peripheral districts – inAgder and Telemark in the southern part of the country, in theinland valleys and forest districts of Østlandet and in certain fjordand mountain areas of Vestlandet. Conversely, the landed estates ofChurch, Crown and aristocracy were dominant in the best and mostcentrally placed agricultural districts – in the Oslofjord area, centralparts of Østlandet, the coastal areas of Vestlandet from Jæren north-wards, most of Trøndelag and parts of northern Norway.10 Thesewere the most densely settled parts of the country where the yieldsof farming were at their highest and conditions most favourable forcreating and controlling more compact groups of tenant farms.These were also the areas where from the end of the tenth century


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the earliest Norwegian towns emerged, in whose surroundings lan-ded estates became particularly dominant.

This was an ownership pattern that reflected the development ofroyal and ecclesiastical influence and organization in the precedingcenturies. Clearly, a major process of redistribution must have takenplace since the start of the Viking Age five hundred years earlier.Larger estates in the hands of petty kings, chieftains and magnatesappear to have existed already at that time, particularly in the coas-tal areas,11 but their precise character and extent cannot be establis-hed. In the cause of the long drawn-out process of political unifica-tion under royal leadership the monarchy appears to have confisca-ted considerable amounts of land from defeated opponents, chief-tains and magnates as well as freeholders. Much of this land wasgiven to ecclesiastical institutions, above all those founded by themonarchy. Although the monarchy continued to acquire new landthroughout the high Middle Ages – by confiscation during the cen-tury of Civil Wars from the 1130s, by claiming ownership to clea-rings in commons at least from the latter part of the twelfth centu-ry, and by receiving land as payment for fines, tax arrears etc. – it


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0–9%

10–24%

25–39%

40–54%

55–69%

Over 70%

0 200 km

Percentages of freehold in southern andcentral Norway in 1661, generally reflect-ing the situation around 1300 as well.(Adapted from Helle, 1991)


seems clear that donations to ecclesiastical institutions, and also todeserving liegemen in the royal hir› or retinue, must altogetherhave reduced the amount of royal land from what it may have beenat its unknown medieval maximum to the 7 per cent of the totalland value it seems to have constituted in the first half of the four-teenth century.

The amount of land possessed by chieftains and magnates in theViking Age was reduced by the confiscation of landed propertybelonging to those who opposed the victorious representatives ofthe monarchy during the unification struggles,12 and also by dona-tions to ecclesiastical foundations. Magnates on the winning side inthe unification process up to and including the Civil Wars probablytook advantage of their position by acquiring land both from defea-ted equals and freeholders, or they were rewarded by gifts of landfrom the king in whose hir› they were organized and served. Yet itseems doubtful whether the estimated 20 per cent of land owned bythe hir› aristocracy towards the end of the high Middle Ages repre-sented an increase in relation to the land controlled by chieftainsand magnates in the Viking Age.

It was the Church that came out as the great winner in the medi-eval quest for landed estates. From the official conversion toChristianity started at the end of the tenth century to the first halfof the fourteenth century, share of the total land value owned by theecclesiastical institutions increased from zero to about 40 per cent.At their foundation they often received clusters of land from kingsand magnates and continued to be given land by the same donors.13

From the late twelfth century, however, larger donations becamerarer as private landowners, following a common north Europeanpractice, started to protect the land that formed the basis for theirsocial rank.14

In the meantime the Church had itself established an activepolicy of land acquisition. At the establishment of a separateNorwegian church province in 1152/1153, Cardinal NicholasBrekespear initiated a statute that was later included in the provin-cial laws, giving landowners the right to partly disregard the here-ditary right of kin to land by donating up to one-tenth of inheritedand one-quarter of self-acquired land to other recipients.15 Theway was thus paved for a stream of pious gifts to the Church in theform of smaller or larger shares of land, not least to local churches.Ecclesiastical institutions also used their considerable income tobuy land, with or without the right of owners to redeem it, andotherwise received it in payment of arrears of tithe and ecclesiasti-cal fines and for providing food and lodging for elderly people intheir estates.


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The concept of ownership

The concept of ownership appears to have changed from the VikingAge to the high Middle Ages. Control over land in the earlier peri-od probably also included people, in the sense that farmers wouldbe personally dependent on chieftains and magnates, owing themyields and services as well as support and loyalty in return for vari-ous favours and protection in the working of the land on whichthey lived.16 Rights of property and use may have been intermixedin a rather diffuse way, implying that different people had differentclaims to the land.

In the provincial laws and the Landlaw, the rights of landed pro-perty are defined more clearly and in a more impersonal way. Thelandowner’s right of property, and consequently of disposal, isregulated in relation to the right of use in the form of tenancy, andboth of them have now become economic rights that do not invol-ve personal dependency. Freeholders possessed all the rights to afarm or holding in a way that corresponds to the modern conceptof property. However, in the case of landowners renting their landto tenants it can be said that the right of property was divided tosome extent. The owner’s right was that of land rent and to varyingdegrees of control according to his contract with the tenant, where-as the right of use of the latter could be far-reaching enough toinvolve elements of what would today be regarded as propertyrights.17 Both freeholders and tenants had rights to use land thatvaried spatially within the resource area of the farm or holding theyworked, from more individual and exclusive rights in the infield torights that were customarily shared with other farmers in outlyingareas and wasteland.

There were also variations in the property rights to various cate-gories of land, not only between freehold and tenanted land but alsobetween ancestral land, to which family and kin had certain rights,and land that had been more recently cleared or acquired in trans-actions such as purchase, exchange, gift or pawn. Beside the rightsover land, descent was a pillar of social status in Norwegian ruralsociety. Ancestral land, handed over hereditarily from generation togeneration, was regarded as ó›al (Old Norse). This was possibly aconcept that originally may simply have denoted inherited land ingeneral at a time when it was mainly transferred within the descentgroup.18 The further traditional inference, that land was originallythe common property of kin, is, however, based on supposition rat-her than empirical evidence.19

As it appears in the provincial laws and the Landlaw, the right ofó›al was an individual right which in legally determined order pro-


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tected the hereditary right of descendants to land at a time whenthis right had come under serious threat from other ways of acqui-ring it – by purchase, gift, confiscation and other means. The ó›alright of the law codes includes not only the right to inherit the landin question but also first refusal on buying or renting it, and toreclaim it from other buyers if it has not been offered to the properheirs for sale.20 When men and women inherited together the ó›alprovisions gave preference to patrilineal descent; in that casewomen had no rights to ó›al land but could acquire it in the pro-bably not infrequent cases when legitimate male heirs were lacking.Male co-heirs had equal rights to ó›al land, which meant that itwould frequently be divided up between heirs, which would influ-ence the settlement pattern. Runic inscriptions indicate that basicelements of this system may date as far back as the late Viking Age.21

Splitting up of landed property through inheritance

and marriage

According to the provincial laws, daughters had no right to inheritland from their parents if they had brothers, but on marrying theymight receive land as part of their dowry. The Landlaw of 1274 intro-duced the right of daughters to inherit from their parents just as sonscould do though with only half a ‘brother’s share’.22 Otherwise allheirs within the same legal degree of kinship, females as well as males,had the right to an equally valued share of the total inheritance inquestion, but this meant that ó›al land would go to male heirs whe-reas women would receive their shares in other land and chattels.

The inheritance system, combined with the practice of givingland in dowry or dower, led to excessive subdivision of landed pro-perty. A farm might be subdivided between co-heirs in variousways. It could be split into physically divided parts or in intermixedshares of equal value. From the various parts new offshoots couldbe projected into the surrounding wasteland, or one heir might begiven the whole infield while the others were allowed to carve newholdings out of the surrounding wasteland. Inheritance and marri-age would thus often reduce the size of landed property units andnot infrequently result in smallholdings. Partible inheritance mightalso over time lead to the formation of patrilocal groups, i.e. groupsof kin-related landholders clustered within a specific locality or dis-persed over a wider territory.

Certain legal provisions were taken to stem the fragmentation offarming units. One was the Landlaw’s prerogative for the eldest sonto take over the main farm,23 provided that he bought out siblings


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who would not otherwise receive their fair shares from inheritance.This was supplemented by a system of land assessment presuppo-sed by the Landlaw, by which co-heirs could inherit shares of a farmor holding from which they were entitled to land rent. Dowry ordower could be meted out in the same fashion. A farm or holdingmight thus be split up between various owners but still be preser-ved as a production unit under one farmer who paid the otherowners land rent. This appears to have been a main motive powerin the development of the tenancy system that appears in the pro-vincial laws and is further regulated by the Landlaw.

Origin and development of the tenancy system

By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was much land thatdid not fulfil the requirements of ó›al land because it had been pur-chased, received in gift, confiscated, cleared or acquired by othermeans than inheritance. Most of it was owned by the Crown, eccle-siastical institutions and larger secular landowners, and would befarmed by tenants. By the first half of the fourteenth century mostNorwegian peasants were tenants, in whole or part, renting theirland from clerical or secular landowners. When taking into consi-deration the part of the freehold land that was worked by farmerswho paid land rent to the formal owners, tenants must have farmedmore than 70 per cent of the land according to value.

The genesis of tenancy in Norway is unclear, and has been deba-ted a lot.24 It has already been mentioned that the presence ofViking Age estates may imply various types of personally depen-dent landholders whereas the tenancy system of the provincial lawsand the Landlaw is more impersonal and uniform, based on strict-ly economic rights and obligations.25

However, there is only meagre and indirect evidence of the oldersystem of personally dependent tenure. Tenants seem to have beenlocated around main farms, often residential farms of petty kings,chieftains and magnates.26 Such farms were probably to a largeextent worked by slaves and freed slaves who may also have played acentral role in the clearing of new land and the establishment of newholdings, which they would then farm in dependence on their mas-ters. Other farmers may have been freemen who owed the leadingmagnates more honourable personal service and/or economic duesin return for protection, gifts and other favours. In this fashion lar-ger landed complexes could be built up around residential and othermain farms, bound together by various degrees of overlordship andinvolving various kinds of dues, economic and other, to the overlord.


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From the early twelfth century at the latest the new impersonalsystem of tenancy was in ascendancy, as witnessed by the provinci-al laws. According to this system the tenants were legally free per-sons who owed the landowners no other dues than the economicobligations imposed by individual contracts within a legally definedframework. Such tenants may partly have started out as freed slaves(Old Norse: leysingjar) but over the years would rid themselves ofall traces of serfdom. The new system of tenancy was obviouslyadapted to the more impersonal power basis of Crown, Church andhir› magnates and their need for a safe and stable income thatwould allow them to pursue other activities than cultivating theland. To a large extent they seem to have given up the working oflarger estates by help of slaves, freed slaves or paid labour in favourof settling tenants on separate holdings.


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Agreement on land leasebetween tenant and land-lord. Tenancy agreementswere often oral contractswith two witnesses presentand finished with a hand-shake. Initial from theLandlaw of 1274.


Renting of land involved not only the right to farm a fixed extentof arable land, but also a complex bundle of other rights such ascommon rights of meadow and pasture, access to woodland and useof parcels of land that could be held in severalty. In general, tenantshad a right to timber and wood for use on their farms and to buildtheir own boats.27 Corresponding rights are also known fromEngland and Denmark.28 Conversely, it was prohibited to take tim-ber or wood out of the farm for profit. There was thus a tension bet-ween the rights of landowner and tenant over woodland, reflectedby legal provisions and a growing number of recorded individualagreements.29 In late medieval records undifferentiated rights towoodland, fishing, gathering, foraging, hunting, mining, quarrying,iron production and the like became differentiated or clarified.

Rights to the wasteland – private or common?

Woodland and other wasteland were vital for the farming economyin most parts of Norway. The use of the wasteland included grazing,gathering, hunting and fishing, fetching wood and timber. Therewere also resources to be extracted for industrial uses: wood forburning charcoal and tar, deposits of bog iron and other ores, stonethat could be quarried for various purposes.

The history of rights to wasteland has traditionally been presen-ted as a gradual process of increasingly closer definition of rights inresponse to population growth and dwindling reserves of outfieldsand wasteland. It is a basic principle of the provincial laws and theLandlaw that each man should have his customary rights to thewasteland. In Vestlandet such rights, namely to shielings and pro-bably also to hunting and fishing, seem to have been established atan early stage and are acknowledged by the Gulathing Law30 where-as commons as such were preserved to a greater degree in the rest ofthe country. They could, however, be defined as the commonresources of certain settlements of farms or holdings and this wouldopen the way for cooperative exploitation in the summer season.31

In spite of the above-mentioned royal property right to clearingsthe commons often seems to have acquired a more private status.


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Settlement and population

Around 890 the Norwegian magnate Ottar (Old English: Othere)told King Alfred of Wessex about living conditions in northernNorway and his extensive travels at home and abroad. He professedto live northernmost of all Norflmen – Norsemen.32 Further northwas the territory of the more or less nomadic ‘Finns’ or Saami whoeked their living out of hunting, gathering and fishing.

Ottar’s residence was somewhere in the southern part of the pre-sent county of Troms.33 Here the fjord of Malangen, south of thepresent town of Tromsø, seems to have constituted a kind of admi-nistrative borderline between Finnmark, the area belonging to theSaami, and the more southerly area of farming Norse settlers (OldNorse: búmenn). However, the divide between the two groups wasnot clear-cut, neither with regard to ways of living nor territoriesinhabited. Around AD 1000 , at the latest, part of the Saami popu-lation could also combine hunting and fishing with some husban-dry34 and Norse coastal farmers also exploited the resources of thesea. North of Malangen, Norse coastal settlers have been traced asfar up as the island of Karlsøy north of Tromsø in Ottar’s days whe-reas the Saami could occupy heads of fjords south of Malangen35

and exploited the inland mountain plateaus as far south asTrøndelag and even areas of Østlandet bordering on Sweden.36

In the half millennium from AD 800 the Norwegian farmingcommunities worked profound changes in the rural landscape.Clearing of new land and the subdivision of old farms transformedthe layout of the farmland and the organization of farms. Newfields, farms and settlements were established at the cost of forestand other wasteland. Nevertheless, vast uncultivated areas remai-ned, offering other resources that could be put to use. Not least wasthe expansion of arable land closely connected with an extensiveexploitation of outlying areas for animal husbandry. Arable far-ming provided fodder for the livestock, which in return provided


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draught animals and manure, crucial for maintaining the fertility ofthe arable land, but the balance between agriculture and animalhusbandry would vary with the natural conditions from district todistrict and also to some extent over time.

Settlement expansion depended on the availability of land sui-ted for colonization. Consequently, there were great variations fromregion to region. From the Viking Age Østlandet had the greatestreserves of cultivable land, which resulted in a particularly stronggrowth of population in the high Middle Ages. Other coastal andinland areas, particularly in Vestlandet, had smaller reserves ofarable land, but both here and further north there were vast outly-ing areas suitable for the collection of fodder, other gathering andhunting, vitally supplemented by fishing along the coast. As awhole, the country represented different types of landscapes withdistinctive physical differences and cultural identities as well as dif-ferences in ownership, building patterns, farming and farmingstructures.

Population growth was obviously a main cause of the processof land clearance, which seems to have seriously started in theeight century or perhaps even earlier,37 and continued towards theend of the high Middle Ages. Although the main trend was expan-sive, contractions and the abandonment of farms and farmlandalso occurred, as was the case in northern Norway in the eleventhcentury, followed by expansion in the twelfth century.38 In mostregions, population growth and settlement expansion appear tohave come to a halt in the late thirteenth or early fourteenthcenturies.

In its main outlines Norwegian land clearance and subdivisionfollowed parallel medieval developments in many northern-European countries. What were the more specific characteristics ofthese processes in Norway, and were there noticeable differencesbetween Norway and other countries?

Land clearing and subdivision of farms

Generally, the beginning of the period under consideration is poor-ly documented. Research has to be based mainly on toponymy,archaeological and botanical (pollen) evidence, combined withinferences drawn from later and better documented conditions.

Burial mounds were not the common way to bury the dead inthe Viking Age or earlier. On freehold farms they seldom occurredmore than once per generation39 and generally less frequently, andare often interpreted as visible manifestations of the first settlers


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who cleared the land. They can, however, also be taken as demarca-tions of ancestral freehold land. Placed centrally in settlements ornear their boundaries, the mounds would then define and symbo-lize the inherited territories of patrilinear groups.40 Generally, buri-al mounds seem to occur more rarely in areas that are later knownas parts of larger estates, indicating that these estates date back tothe Viking period or earlier. Statistical concurrence of burialmounds and freehold farms and the lack of such conjuncture bet-ween burial mounds and estates have so far been best documentedin Vestlandet.41 The distribution of burial mounds may thus reflectthe establishment and continued existence of both freehold farmsand estates.

The rich heritage of prehistoric and medieval place namesresults in a more detailed understanding of the development ofrural settlement.42 Various types of farm names – altogether5,000–6,000 – can be dated to the Viking Age and partly also to thepreceding centuries of the Iron Age, and bear witness to a fairlyintense colonization in that period, indicating that settlementsoften spread to the outskirts of older settlements and to more mar-ginal agricultural areas. Such names are compounds ending in -stad(ca. 2,500), -land (ca. 2,000), -tveit (ca. 900), -set (ca. 900) and -seter(ca. 1,700). Altogether, late Iron Age and Viking Age settlementexpansion seems to have been particularly extensive in the westernand south-western parts of Norway, as witnessed by the suffixes ofland, tveit, set and seter.

In the following Middle Ages the reserves of cultivable land inthe forest and other wasteland of Østlandet made more extensivesettlement expansion possible than in other parts of the country.The general movement was away from old settlement cores to moreperipheral and marginal land – into forests and up the valleys andhillsides. Consequently, a royal ordinance by 1273 declaredØstlandet to be more densely populated than other parts of thecountry.43 In some areas of the region the number of farms mayhave been doubled or even tripled from around 800 to the end ofthe high Middle Ages. Generally, the new medieval farms and sett-lements were small and peripheral, as witnessed by about 10,000medieval farm names. Of these the most widespread type are atleast 3,000–4,000 compounds ending in -rud/-rød, meaning clea-ring. They are most frequently found on the outskirts of older sett-lements in the Oslofjord region and the best agricultural inlandareas.44 Altogether, the new medieval farm names of Østlandet indi-cate that settlements spread to large areas of forest and valley andthat it became denser because of the establishment of new andsmaller holdings in between the older farms.


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The settlement expansion in Trøndelag was more restrictedthan in Østlandet; only about 27 per cent of the farms existing atthe end of the high Middle Ages seem to have been establishedlater than the outset of the Viking Age.45 Some areas saw a piece-meal and cumulative colonization by successive generations offarmers whereas other areas were characterized more by flux thanstability. In the inland and mountains valleys half or more of thefarms existing around 1300 could be clearings of later date thanAD 800, about the same proportion as in parts of Østlandet. Somevalleys even saw sedentary settlement and cultivation for the firsttime.46

In Vestlandet, including the southernmost region of Agder, andnorthern Norway the more restricted reserves of cultivable landhindered medieval settlement expansion from becoming as extensi-ve as in Østlandet and Trøndelag. Instead, the growth of populati-on found an alternative outlet in a higher degree of subdivision ofolder farms than in other parts of the country.47 This was a processthat would result both in multiple farms consisting of two or moreholdings and in new and separately named farms.

Pollen analyses suggest that many of the newly settled areas, notleast in western Norway, had been cleared of forest at an early stage(cf. Myhre this volume) and that little woodland survived. Suchareas must then have been used for grazing, foraging and even cul-tivation long before they became separate farms or holdings.Nevertheless, they contained reserves of land that might allow sett-lement expansion. On the other hand, the clearing of woodlandand other wasteland for cultivation would increase the pressure onthe remaining wasteland. New settlers would thus rarely be able toclear land that was ‘empty’ in the sense that it was not already used.Consequently, commons and other wasteland became areas of con-flict where borderlines had to be more clearly defined. Both largerlandowners and peasants were parts of such conflicts and the fric-tions between different interests appear to have been a drivingforce in establishing clearer boundaries between farms and settle-ments. Many of the new farm names of the period reflect theseprocesses.

How did the expansion and subdivision of settlement affect thesettlement pattern? In southern Scandinavia as in England lordshipcontributed to nucleation in the sense that dispersed settlementswere transformed and concentrated into larger, village-type units.In England this was a process that started in the eighth and ninthcenturies. At the same time an opposite trend in the form of split-ting up into separate farms can be observed.48 What was the situa-tion in these respects in Norway?


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Dispersed settlement or agglomeration?

The main unit of production and settlement in Norwegian agrarianstudies has been the so-called ‘named farm’ (navnegård), that is afarm denoted by its own name – regardless of its structure, size anddegree of subdivision into holdings.49 Neither Old Norse normodern Norwegian makes use of terms corresponding to ‘village’and ‘hamlet’ when describing native settlements. In the neighbour-ing Scandinavian countries the concept of village has been put touse but there is no linguistic distinction between village and ham-let. In Norway, then, the farm concept covers a whole range of dif-ferent rural settlement structures – from small separate holdingsinhabited and run by one family or household to large subdividedagricultural units, partly clustered together so that they resemblehamlets and even modest villages.

An all-embracing concept of a farm as a complete resource ter-ritory – the territory within the farm’s boundaries (Old Norse:innan stafs) – only existed in the form of the farm’s name. The sepa-rate elements or structures of the farm territory were, however,denoted by their own terms. The common noun for the inhabitedand cultivated area was Old Norse bær, b‡r,50 derived from búa(dwell, reside – etymologically identical with Swedish by – village),or the synonyms ból and bólsta›r. The nucleus of the settlement wascalled bœli or tún (cf. English ‘town’), as in Old English referring tothe residential area and the space between the farmhouses – the far-myard. A central farm was called hofu›ból (main farm), indicatingsmaller and probably subordinate farms nearby. The farm territorywas termed jor› or land, including both infield and outfield. OldNorse: gar›r (etymologically identical with English ‘yard’) original-ly denoted the fenced-in settled and arable land. Its secondary,extended meaning of ‘farm’ as a settled and economic agrarian unitdoes not seem to have originated before the thirteenth century, andthen most frequently used in Østlandet and Trøndelag.51

Originally, Norse people also lacked a special term for holding(bruk) as a unit of production run by one household, normally afamily.52 This may have been due to looser and less defined pro-perty rights and a higher degree of joint farming practice thanlater.

The holdings of a multiple farm with their houses might each beseparate, or they might be concentrated in a common tún, resemb-ling a hamlet or even a small village. The separately placed holdingsand tún of a farm might have their own sub-names with prefixesindicating their situation in relation to each other – upper, middleand lower, inner and outer, north, east, south, west, and the like –


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c


and could later develop into separate named farms. Holdings inmultiple tún could be referred to by their dwelling house (OldNorse: stofa or hús) but normally the farm name gives no clear refe-rence to type of settlement.

Subdivided, agglomerated farms with their houses built closelytogether in a common tún were mostly to be found in the coastalareas of western and northern Norway and in the central and eas-tern Norwegian border areas towards Sweden, including the laterSwedish districts of Jämtland and Bohuslän, now belonging toSweden.53 In Bohuslän it has been estimated that about 40% of thefarms were clustered in hamlets (byar),54 some of them with a struc-ture resembling the west Norwegian agglomerated farm.

Sometimes the sources show glimpses of such nucleated farms.In 1314, Kvåle, one of the largest farms in the west Norwegian com-munity of Sogndal, was divided between three heirs. Here 20–30houses were clustered together in the same tún: several dwellinghouses, and outhouses, a church and several houses belonging tothe priest.55 At this time Kvåle was the residence of local nobles andprobably farmed by hired labour. In the late Middle Ages and in thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries as many as 6–7 tenants withtheir households worked the farm. The structure of the farm ofKvåle was not unique, it resembles agglomerated settlements knownfrom later sources. Like Kvåle some of these were core areas and cul-tural foci with seats of magnates and churches. Their centrality wasprobably originally due to factors such as high quality land andconvergence of lines of communication. Once established they hadgreat durability.

A settlement pattern of separate, dispersed farms has beenregarded as typical for most of Norway, and Østlandet andTrøndelag in particular. Neither of these regions was, however,homogeneous in farm structure. Some of the largest farms weresubdivided into three or four holdings in the high Middle Ages andmight constitute quite large units. To what degree such holdingswere clustered together or separated from each other is unclear, butsome examples of common tún are known from Østlandet andTrøndelag as well. Nevertheless, the great majority of farms in theseparts of the country were comparatively small and separate, beingworked by only one household, and this was also a widespread sett-lement pattern in other parts of Norway.56

The pattern of separate, dispersed farms may have originated invarious ways. Land clearing by individual peasant colonists wouldnaturally result in such a pattern. It would be furthered by therestricted and fragmented patches of cultivable land left in manyareas in the high Middle Ages. The pioneering spirit of individual


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colonists was stimulated by a deliberate royal policy of rewards inthe form of tax relief and of partial ownership to and reduced landrent from farms cleared in commons.57 A dispersed settlement pat-tern could also be the result of grants of land on the edge of existingsettlements to free tenants, a process that can be documented inmany parts of the country. Partible inheritance and weak lordshipmay also have contributed to the pattern of separate farms and hol-dings. In general, this was a pattern that can be said to be connec-ted to the clearing of new land and the establishment of new settle-ments. Subdivision leading to agglomeration was mainly a pheno-menon within older settlements.

The origin of clustered settlements in Norway is still unclear,and should be seen as a process over a longer period, determined byfactors such as available resources and soil conditions, ownershipand tenure, and social practices. It is not clear how Norwegianmedieval farms developed in size, apart from the fact that the ave-rage size of holdings must have been reduced throughout the peri-od under consideration. The presence of landlords who supervisedthe process of land allocation may explain that holdings were estab-lished around a common centre in the early part of the period. Innorthern Norway clustered settlements in form of small fishing vil-lages (vær, Old Norse: ver) and so-called farm mounds – accumula-ted masses and deposits of household refuse, ruins of buildings etc.0.5–5 m high covering areas of 50–200 x 50–100 m – emerged fromthe later part of the period.58 This was connected with the develop-ment of commercial fisheries. However, their agrarian aspect wasmainly limited to animal husbandry.

To sum it up, the rural settlement pattern of Viking Age andmedieval Norway was not homogeneous, which should serve as awarning against any monocausal explanation and rather draw atten-tion to a number of possible causal factors in a wide economic andsocial context: fragmentation of property rights and partible of inhe-ritance, gifts, sales, mortgages, land grants, and the like. Manorialtenure and social stratification may have been more important thanhas been asserted in previous research. More research is undoubted-ly needed to clarify and explain the development of Norwegian sett-lement in the period. Here, attention should not least be drawn to thefact that the all-embracing term of farm will include a wider range ofsettlement types than traditionally assumed, varying between the dif-ferent regions of the country as well as within these regions.

In a Scandinavian perspective there is undoubtedly some truth inthe difference that has sometimes been emphasized between the pre-dominance of separate, dispersed farms and holdings in the westNordic region consisting of Norway, Iceland and peripheral Swedish


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districts and, on the other hand, the east Nordic village or hamlet dis-tricts of most of Denmark, central Sweden and parts of Finland. Thedividing line between the two main types of settlement is far fromclear-cut, neither geographically nor factually. Terminologically wehave seen that the term of by/bø covers both the Swedish hamlet andthe medieval Norwegian farm, and the latter might comprise asmany agglomerated holdings as Swedish or Danish hamlets and evenvillages.59 In recent archaeological and partly also historical researchin Scandinavia the difference between hamlets and villages has beenblurred by the minimum definition of a village as a cluster of onlythree farms or holdings.60 The agglomerated Norwegian farms were,however, generally smaller and more irregular and had more limitedarable land than Danish medieval villages.

Farming of subdivided farms

We have seen that the subdivision of a farm into separately ownedshares did not automatically imply that it would be correspondinglysplit up into separately farmed parts; it could be preserved as a sing-le production unit farmed by a holder who paid land rent to the sha-reowners. Nor did subdivision into parts farmed by different holdersnecessarily mean that the farmland was split up into demarcated,self-contained units; the holders could also farm intermixed fields.The third option was probably less common. Here the farm was far-med as a single unit and only dividing the produce, not the land.61

In the case of shareholdings the various shares of the infield couldbe periodically reallocated so that holdings did not remain fixed forany length of time, be it as separate units or subdivisions of fields. Thiscould happen annually or at least when a new shareholder tookover62and might result in re-planning of fields and new subdivisions.The outfield and waste were measured and calculated in more gene-ral terms according to rights. Consequently, holdings could be consti-tuted by bundles of specific strips and parcels of the infield and sha-res in the common resources of the farm or settlement. Ownershipand rights of use of holdings of this type would be expressed as a pro-portion of the whole farm with no more exact specification given.

Population size and growth

The cumulative result of colonization in the Viking period and MiddleAges was a landscape of relatively densely settled areas along the coastand in inland parts of Østlandet and Trøndelag. Here the valleys weredotted with farms and holdings, and more dispersed agricultural sett-


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lements were found in more peripheral and marginal parts of thecountry. When medieval rural settlement reached its height in the firstpart of the fourteenth century – an extent that was not reached againuntil the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the total number ofnamed farms in the country has been estimated at about 38,000 andthe number of holdings at about 64,000–85,000. The highest numberwould imply that there were 20–25 per cent more holdings at the highmedieval maximum than around 1665 (cf. Lunden, this volume). Itshould, however, be emphasized that it is impossible to measure theextent to which farms were divided into holdings more precisely.

Neither is it possible to calculate the size of the population withany degree of accuracy before around 1665. Estimates of the totalpopulation size at the high medieval maximum suffer not only frominsufficient evidence of the total number of holdings but also fromlack of knowledge about the average number of people living oneach holding. Around 1665 the number of people per holding ave-raged about six,63 which – given the above-mentioned numbers ofholdings – would mean a population ranging between about400,000 and 530,000 at the end of the high Middle Ages. Againstthis it has been argued that the mean household size was now hard-ly higher than 4.5 people64 and the total population corresponding-ly lower. There is, however, no reliable contemporary evidence offactors such as fertility, mortality and mobility, family and house-hold structures. Consequently, demographical evidence of familyand household sizes will remain uncertain.

Around 800, at the beginning of the period under considerati-on, the number of named farms is less known than in the highmedieval maximum and population estimates based on the extentof settlement will consequently be even more uncertain. However,farm-names do indicate that the number of farms at the beginningof the Viking Age may not have been more than one fourth of whatit was in the first half of the fourteenth century. Generally largerfarm territories may then have supported larger households than atthe end of the high Middle Ages when the number of smallholdingsmust have been considerable. Altogether, it is conceivable that thetotal population was at least doubled and perhaps even trebled fromabout 800 to about 1350.

The decline of the fourteenth century

Traditionally, the outbreak of the Black Death and the followingepidemics have been seen as the decisive factor behind the large-scale contraction in settlement, population fall and the decrease of


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agrarian production in late medieval Norway. The results of thelarge Nordic research programme on desertion of the land and landcolonization ca. 1300–1600 (1969–1976) also supported this view.65

Nevertheless, a process of stagnation and even decline may havestarted already before the outbreak of the Black Death. Someexamples of abandoned land are recorded by 1330, at about thesame time as cases of reduced land rent can be documented invarious parts of the country.66 In the course of the thirteenth andthe first half of the fourteenth centuries large-scale hunting andother time-consuming and labour-intensive activities in outfieldsand wasteland stagnated and even ceased in some areas. Thus, theextensive production of iron, tar and charcoal in inland areas ofØstlandet decreased or ended more than 50 years before the BlackDeath, in some areas even earlier.67 Legal regulations with a view tosecuring the supply of agricultural wage labourers and stimulatethe farming of abandoned land are known already from the mid-thirteenth century.68 These may all be indications of a lack of agri-cultural labour that was due to demographic stagnation and eventhe start of decline.


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År 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600

Climate curve for Trøndelag

Climate curve from ca. AD 700 to 1600 based on dendrochronological analyses of timber fromTrøndelag. The curve is uncertain for the oldest period and for the time around 1300, but indi-cates colder summers from the late thirteenth century.(Adapted from Thun/Haugan, 1998)


The latter half of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourte-enth centuries may thus constitute a transitional period between along era of expansion, starting already before the Viking Age, andthe late medieval era of large-scale population decline, settlementcontraction and abandonment of land. It should, however, beemphasized that the evidence for such a transitional stage is meagreand not unambiguous. For instance, colonization was still takingplace in inland parts of Østlandet as late as the 1320s.

The case for a transitional period has been supported by refe-rences to a parallel trend in other North European countries in thesame period.69 Two explanatory factors that were early put forwardhere have also been prominent in the Norwegian discussion: thechange to a colder and more humid climate and the possibleexhaustion of the fertility of arable land.70

The result of such processes would be reduced agricultural pro-ductivity, which would again have demographic consequences, par-ticularly in marginal agricultural areas as those of Norway.However, such effects have proved hard to substantiate due to lackof direct evidence, and today in Norway, as elsewhere in northernEurope, there is rather a tendency to seek explanations of stagnati-on and decline ca. 1250–1350 in the interplay between demograp-hic and various socio-economic developments. Finally, the problemboils down to the question of the fundamental balance betweenpopulation and resources, which will be finally discussed at the endof this section, after a closer look at the Viking Age and medievalNorwegian peasant society as well as the native methods of farmingin the same period.


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Rural society

The rural communities of Viking Age and medieval Norway werestratified and power was vested in a small group of people.Nevertheless, the distinctions between higher and lower ranks wereprobably smaller and society was more egalitarian than in manyother parts of western and northern Europe.

In the provincial laws people were graded according to social andeconomic status and three distinct groups can be discerned: on thetop; the land-owning aristocracy – a narrow circle of royalty, highclergy and magnates mostly in the king’s service. Under them; freefarmers (Old Norse: bœndr, sing. bóndi), in the wide sense of theterm, and at the bottom the totally alienated slaves (flrælar). Thegroup of farmers was heterogeneous, comprising both freeholdersand tenants. The latter would also include freed slaves (leysingjar)on their way to becoming fully free peasant status. Freed slaves pro-bably also contributed to shaping a group of cottagers (kotkarlar)that must have relied on agricultural wage labour or forms of non-agricultural employment to make a living. There was also a comple-tely land-less element of labourers and poor people. The summerseason from April to September, and the grain harvest in particular,called for a high influx of day-labourers, many of them women.

In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries inequalitieswithin the farming group were reduced, as attested not least by dif-ferences between the provincial laws and the Landlaw of 1274.Slavery disappeared and the peasants generally became a morehomogenous group of modest and smallholding farmers. We havealready seen that land tenure underwent changes that made relati-ons between tenant farmers and landowners more impersonal anduniform. Landowners no longer controlled dependent householdsand persons but exercised purely economic rights over land, main-ly in the form of land rent and in the case of Crown and Churchalso through taxation. Consequently the farming families and hou-seholds enjoyed greater freedom from social restrictions.


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The basic group in the farming society was the family or house-hold, on which taxes were levied. The household (Old Norse: hjón,equivalent to European medieval terms such as manse, huba, hide)comprised the family and its employees, and could vary greatly insize. The smallest unit was run by an einvirki (lone farmer), a maleadult whose household did not consist of more than wife andunder-aged children and possibly also female servants. Ordinaryfarmers’ households would additionally consist of one or moremale adults beside the farmer himself – be it sons, other kinsmen,servants or slaves – in addition to female members and minor chil-dren, 71 and could be quite numerous on larger farms. Land-owningmagnates on their part could have very large households of slaves,servants and other employees in addition to their own family;according to the saga tradition there could be households of morethan thirty slaves in the early eleventh century.72 Extended familiesof three generations also occurred, but may have been rare becauseof the low life expectancy. Altogether, the size of households variedgreatly both in space and time. Generally, they appear to have beenlarger in the earlier than in the later part of the period, due to theincreasing number of subdivided farms and smallholdings towardsthe end of the high Middle Ages.

Slavery and its disappearance

Slavery seems to have constituted a normal part of Norwegian far-ming in the Viking period and early Middle Ages, as was the case inthe rest of western and northern Europe at the same time. Both sla-very and its disappearance are attested by law-codes as well as nar-rative sources. More than hundred paragraphs of the provinciallaws refer to slavery, indicating its importance.73 They discern bet-ween native and foreign slaves, with a preference for the former. TheGulathing Law generally reflects an older phase than theFrostathing Law, but both of them emphasize the process of freeingslaves in a way that would seem to indicate that slavery was on thewane in the twelfth century. By the mid-thirteenth century it appe-ars to have vanished completely, so that the Landlaw of 1274 doesnot even mention freed slaves as part of the social structure. Slaverythus disappeared earlier in Norway than in Denmark and particu-larly Sweden, but later than for instance in England.74

Legally, the slaves had status of objects rather than persons attheir lord’s disposal. They could be given important householdfunctions but generally had to perform heavy and less prestigiousagricultural and other tasks. They were, however, rather expensive.


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A native male slave in his best age – between 15 and 40 years –would in Norway cost nine times the price of a cow in the twelfthcentury.75 The master was responsible for his slaves in courts of law,and could sell or give them away as he wished.

There is no reliable evidence for the number of slaves in Norwayat any one time. Estimates vary from 50,000–75,000 at the end ofthe Viking Age to one fourth of the population at the highest,76 butthis is little more than educated guesswork. Generally, slaves in theirViking Age heyday seem to have been normal parts of farming hou-seholds; even tenants of modest means and freed slaves could keeptheir own slaves,77 as known from other west European countries aswell. Larger farms could have a dozen or more, if we are to believethe sagas. Natural procreation, warfare and trade replenished theservile population. Import of slaves is known about from around900, but is probably an older phenomenon; it seems to have cometo a halt in the twelfth century.78

Slaves belonged outright to a master from birth to death andchildren brought into the world by a female slave were defined as sla-ves regardless of their father’s status. A freeman could, however, con-vey free status to his child by a slave woman and even acknowledgeit as his heir. Slave marriages were recognized by law, probably notleast because they were important for the internal recruitment of sla-ves.79 Slaves were also allowed to partly work for their own benefit;in this way they could buy their freedom and acquire land.

Freed slaves and their kin would to some degree and for sometime, varying between the Gulathing and Frostathing Laws, owetheir masters and their successors certain obligations and servicesand thus legally constituted an intermediate dependent group betw-een slaves and freemen. There were probably several circumstancesthat contributed to the decrease and ultimate disappearance ofNorwegian slavery in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but themain reason may simply have been economic expediency. As thepopulation increased and labour became more easily available land-owners seem to have preferred to rent their land to land-hungrytenants rather than cultivating it on their own account by help offorced labour. Slaves could be given plots of land to clear and farm,thus procuring the means for buying their freedom. As freed andtenanted slaves they would for some time be under their masters’control and secure them a solid and permanent income in the formof land rent and other dues 80 The settling of slaves and freed slaveson tenanted land is a process that seems to be reflected in the sett-lement pattern of smallholdings and subordinated holdings on thefringes of larger farms and in the often derogatory names given tosuch holdings.


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To the degree that extra labour was still needed for large-scalefarming of residential and other main farms and for the working ofordinary farms and holdings it appears that servants and hired sea-sonal labourers took over the earlier tasks of slaves. The supply ofsuch labour would increase as the population grew and the cost ofhiring it may have decreased to a level that made it economicallyviable compared to the use of probably less effective slave labour.Moreover, the keeping of slaves involved various responsibilities forthe masters that were avoided by using free and hired labour. Thiswould seem to explain why hired agricultural labourers (Old Norse:leigumenn, verkmenn, vinnumenn) figure more prominently in thesources from the thirteenth century. Such labour and householdservants were probably to a large extent recruited from the group offreed slaves as long as it existed. As for the apparent shortage of sea-sonal agricultural labourers from the mid-thirteenth century, it maybe due not only to demographic stagnation but also to the total dis-appearance of slavery and dependent freed slaves.

The conditions of tenants and freeholders

The tenancy system of the twelfth century, as regulated by the pro-vincial laws, implies that tenants were now normally free peasantswho rented their land according to individual and mutually bindingagreements with the landowners. As free farmers they had the rightand duty to carry arms and attend the public courts (Old Norse:fling) that also functioned as meeting places and fora of negotiati-ons between peasants and representatives of Crown and Church.Even though the provincial laws imply that freed slaves and theirstill dependent successors could also hold land in tenancy, they pro-bably did not constitute more than a moderate minority of thetwelfth-century Norwegian tenants and appear to have vanishedcompletely by the mid-thirteenth century.

Within the general legal framework established by the provinci-al laws, the tenants had the right to use the land they rented on con-dition that they fulfilled two main obligations towards the landow-ner: the payment of land rent (Old Norse: landskyld) and the dutyof maintaining the holding they rented and on which they lived(Old Norse: ábu›). The duration of leases could obviously varyconsiderably. The Gulathing Law mentions annual contracts whilethe Frostathing Law and the Landlaw limit the leases contracted bylandowners’ agents on their own to three years.81 However, there isnothing in the medieval law-codes that prevented longer leasesfrom being stipulated in the obligatory individual agreement be-


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tween landowner and tenant, and the Frostathing Law and theLandlaw imply that such leases were negotiated.

From the two last decades of the thirteenth century there arerecords that document both time-based and life-long leases, someof the latter even with the right of heirs to continue to hold the land.Life-long leases seem to have been practised particularly by centralecclesiastical institutions such as episcopal sees and monasteriesand probably also by the Crown – in the latter case at least as ameans of stimulating clearings in the commons to which the Crownclaimed ownership.82 In 1289 the first Norwegian tenant mentionedin a record, Arne Gasse, was thus given life-long tenure of a smallCrown holding in the common of the community of Ski near Osloand the promise of private ownership of half the land he wouldadditionally clear.83

Even though there is far from sufficient evidence for calculating,over time, the occurrence of life-long in proportion to time-basedleases it may be that the former were a product of the assumeddemographic stagnation from the latter half of the thirteenth cen-tury. This made it harder for large landowners to find good tenants.But it should also be taken into consideration that it was in the inte-rest of both the Crown and central ecclesiastical institutions to havestable tenants that could be trusted to pay their dues regularly.

As a consequence of demographic pressure and land clearing arapidly expanding periphery of tenanted holdings emerged in thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries, carved out of outfields, forest andother wasteland, often common land. As tenant farming becamethe normal way of working the estates of the Crown, the Churchand magnates making inroads in freehold land through the inheri-tance and marriage system and voluntary or forced transfers to theChurch and Crown. Tenants would – as we have seen – come toconstitute the great majority of Norwegian farmers at the end ofthe high Middle Ages.

Current estimates indicate that the mean level of land rents wasat that time about one-sixth of the average gross output of a hol-ding. Rent was paid in kind from the output, most commonly ingrain and butter but also in fish, timber, skins, hides and the like,indicating the importance of outfields and wasteland. The amountof land rent was settled by contract and was probably to a largeextent determined by tradition. By the time of the Landlaw, tenantfarming had become so omnipresent that Crown taxation was fixedaccording to the size of land rent, meaning that all holdings, inclu-ding those worked by their owners, were to be assessed according totheir value as rented objects.84 It is this universal and long-lastingsystem of land assessment – recorded in land registers, tax lists and


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other documents – that makes it possible to estimate the distributi-on of landed property and various other quantitative calculations ofagricultural conditions and developments in high and late medievalNorway.

In the course of high Middle Ages all farmers, freeholders aswell as tenants, were subjected to taxation by the Crown andChurch. Payment of tithes to the Church was introduced inNorway in the first part of the twelfth century and made legallybinding over most of the country in the 1160s, several hundredyears later than in England but only a little later than in Denmarkand somewhat earlier than in Sweden.85 In the latter phase of thecentury of civil wars from the 1130s, the economic contributions ofthe peasantry to the naval levy (Old Norse: lei›angr) was graduallyconverted into more regular taxation and in 1274 the Landlaw pre-scribed the payment of annual lei›angr during peace time, fixed athalf the provisions due in the case of mobilization. When such dueswere added to the land rent a tenant and his family may have hadto pay altogether about thirty per cent of their gross produce to theCrown, Church and landowners.86 This is about the same level as inother north European countries, but then labour services on thelandowners’ demesne were not claimed and other forms of perso-nal dependency did not exist.

Freeholders owning their own land did not have to pay land rentand enjoyed a higher legal status than tenants as they had free dis-posal of their land and their kin enjoyed the right to inherit it.Freeholders with ó›al right (Old Norse: hauldar, sing. hauldr) con-stituted a farming elite with a higher legal ‘right’ – broadly speakingthe sum of individual rights, above all to compensation for variousviolations or infringements – than tenants and freeholders withoutó›al right. However, the hauldar were probably not a numerousgroup in relation to the great majority of tenants and other freehol-ders at the end of the high Middle Ages. Moreover, the distinctionbetween freeholders and tenants had by now become blurred by thewidespread practice of part tenure, meaning that many peasantswould farm part of their holdings as owners and pay land rent toother owners for the rest. As most of the best agricultural land wasnow in the hand of larger landowners, part of their tenants may alsohave been relatively well off compared to many freeholders.

In the course of the high Middle Ages Norwegian rural societybecame more homogeneous than it had been in the Viking periodand early Middle Ages – through the disappearance of slavery, thedrift towards modest holdings and smallholdings, the growth oftenancy and the blurred distinction between tenancy and freehold.These conditions together with weak lordship and strengthened


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royal power fostered the traditional assumption that the medievalNorwegian farming society was generally freer and more egalitarianthan that of other contemporary European societies with a morefeudal and hierarchical structure. However, it should be emphasizedthat to all appearances the rural communities of Norway had previ-ously been more hierarchical and more strongly socially stratifiedthan they were at the end of the high Middle Ages.

Mobile or stationary farmers?

It may well be that rural stability has been overestimated in earlierresearch. Private landowners could have a fixed abode but couldalso possess several residences which they moved between.Demographic pressure and ownership patterns may have stimula-ted the mobility of tenants. The short-term land leases mentionedin the law-codes were probably often renewed but can also meanthat farmers and their households were often more than once intheir lifetime on the move with their chattels, domestic animals andother movable goods. This is supported by the law-codes’ detailedregulations in the process of moving, which stressed both thetenants’ rights and restrictions imposed on them in such cases.

A system of reallocation linked to joint tenures also seems to beconnected with short-term leases. Such systems are also knownfrom other parts of northern Europe, such as Ireland and Scotland,in the same period,87 and meant that the relationship between thetenants and the land they cultivated was being continuously brokenand re-forged.

Generally, short-term leases and mobility should probably beseen as being connected to with demographic pressure and anample supply of cheap manpower.88 As indicated above, there mayhave been a trend towards longer time-based and life-long leases asa consequence of demographic stagnation from the latter half of thethirteenth century.


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Farms and farming practices

A farm was not only a domicile with land and domestic animalsthat secured the subsistence of people living there. On a symboliclevel it represented fertility, myth, ancestral tradition, history andpower. These were all factors that influenced farming practices andthe way farms were structured. However, it is the economic andfunctional aspects that have so far dominated research into farmsand farming.

Farm houses

The tún with its dwelling houses and outhouses formed the core ofthe farm. Its layout varied in time and space, in accordance with thesettlement pattern, the composition of the households and theirsocial and economic position. The tradition of building so-calledlonghouses, which were long and narrow buildings with rooms forvarious functions, continued into the Viking period and MiddleAges. In such houses rooms for dwelling, working and storage andbyres for the livestock were placed under one roof. From the elev-enth century, and in some places even earlier, the multifunctionallonghouses were increasingly replaced by smaller and more diffe-rentiated farm-buildings, containing one or two rooms for specialfunctions: dwelling houses, cookhouses, saunas, stables, cowsheds,sheepsheds, goathouses, pigsties, barns, mill houses, smithies etc.The dwelling houses were generally smaller and more varied in sizeand plan than earlier. While longhouses could shelter several hou-seholds the shorter medieval dwelling houses were probably notbuilt for more than one household.

Altogether, the differentiation and specialization of farm buil-dings was probably connected with the trend towards smaller hou-seholds, and offered functional advantages. By separating the diffe-rent breeds of animals the amount of fodder could be reduced, as


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larger animals produce more heat and humidity than smaller bre-eds and could endure lower temperatures without additional fod-der.89 Storage functions were improved when accommodated bytheir own buildings or separate rooms in larger storage buildings.Moving the animals out of the longhouses could also represent anew lifestyle with greater distance to the animals.

Building techniques were also improved, not least by raising thewooden buildings on timber frames that rested onto stone founda-tions so that they would last longer. This was done in other parts ofScandinavia as well.90 People also began to build two-storied ‘lofts’,generally with a room for food storage on the ground floor and asleeping or living room on top where clothes and other textilescould be stored. Two-storied houses were also built for storagefunctions only and may have been influenced by the new urbanarchitecture. Some of them have still survived with timber that canbe dated back to the thirteenth century.91

Wooden buildings were mostly erected in two main techniques:post and beam or log construction. The first construction methodappears to have been predominant in Vestlandet in the Viking peri-od and early Middle Ages, whereas log houses with timbers notchedtogether in the corners appear in eastern Norway from the ninthcentury, and in the early Middle Ages became predominant both inthis region and in Trøndelag. Log construction seems to have spre-ad to Vestlandet in the high Middle Ages, as attested by the urbanexcavations in Bergen and in Borgund in Sunnmøre, but this didnot supplant the traditional post and beam constructions, whichhave been used continually up to the present time.

Building in stone did not seriously start in Norway until the lateeleventh century and was largely reserved for monumental and pre-stigious buildings commissioned by the Crown and Church and ina few cases by private magnates. Outside the towns such buildingsmostly appeared in the form of churches and monastic buildingsand in a few cases as bottom stories in prestigious two-storied farmbuildings with timbered living quarters on top.

Farm structures and land use

Medieval Norway saw a wide range of farm types, from farms ofone household that was completely independent of its neighboursat one extreme, to the agglomerated farms set in fairly extensiveopen fields, where cultivation was subject to communal organizati-on, at the other. There were mainly pastoral farms in the inner val-leys and uplands of Østlandet and in large parts of northern and


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western Norway, where cultivable land was limited and surroundedby extensive wasteland, and the more balanced mixed farms in thelowlands of Trøndelag, Østlandet, Jæren and smaller areas in therest of the country, where more land was cultivable and waste gene-rally accounted for a far smaller part of the landed resources. Inspite of geographical variety and regional types there were never-theless similarities between farms all over the country with regardto structure, function, nomenclature and chronology.

Essentially, Viking age and medieval farms consisted of twocomplementary components that reflected a mixed and integratedcattle and arable economy: on the one hand the farmland properwithin the fence (innan gar›s), consisting of plots of arable land,meadows and enclosed pastures; and on the other, the outlying por-


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The medieval types of fences have been used until the present. The materials and building techniques varied accord-ing to function. Fences of brushwood (above left) were simpler constructions than the wooden fences of diagonaldesign (above right). Fences of piles (below) existed in different variations. Stone fences were the most solid ones.


tion of the farm – outfields and waste outside the fence (utangar›s). The common wasteland further away was added to these twomain parts of the farm proper.

The infield was the fertile and more intensively farmed nucleusof the farm but demographic pressure could also lead to the cultiva-tion of outfields where and when it was possible, and the clearing ofnew holdings would alter the demarcation lines between infield andoutfield. While the farmers of multiple farms would have exclusiverights over parts of the common infield for at least part of the year,they normally had to satisfy themselves with common rights ofexploitation in the outfields and wasteland within the outer boun-daries (innan stafs) of the farms which contained pastures andforest. Further away the commons were in Old Norse denoted by theterm almenningr, that is an area open for ‘all men’. In practice, howe-ver, single farms and larger settlements would often have establishedexclusive customary rights of exploitation in commons, as expressedby the legal phrase that ‘every man has the right to his allmenningr’.

The fence that surrounded the infield (Old Norse: gar›r, cf. Scottishgarth) signified a spatial differentiation of the farm that was generallydetermined by the cultivable land. It was usually built in stone or vari-ous wooden constructions but could also be a hedge or dike.

Rock, large stones, water and other natural barriers would serve asboundaries when possible. On tenanted farms the boundary betweeninfield and outfield was also a dividing line between land over whichthe tenants had full rights of use and wasteland where the landownersonly allowed the tenants exploitation for their own use, not for profit.

Functionally, the boundary of the infield was a line across whichlivestock was moved seasonally. Animals were put out to graze inthe waste in the spring and came back to feed on the aftermath andstubble after hay and grain crops had been harvested. The primaryfunction of fences was to keep livestock from entering and dama-ging the growing crops during summer, or to enclose common pas-tures in outfields and waste, which might be the first step towardscultivation of such pieces of land. Symbolically, fencing expressed ascheme for ordering the universe, by which different parts of theland served as dwelling places for the deities, human beings, giantsand other forces of chaos of Norse mythology.

Fields and field systems

We have already seen that farms could be subdivided in differentways that would have consequences for the layout and farming offields. Subdivision of property right did not automatically lead to


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the physical splitting up of the cultivable land; the farm could bekept as a production unit worked by a farmer who paid land rent tothe various shareowners to which he himself could belong or not.But the farmland could also be divided into separate, consolidatedholdings, each worked by their own farmer – freeholder, tenant ora combination of both.

On agglomerated farms the field systems became more compli-cated and consequently required a higher degree of communalorganization. In such cases the Gulathing Law of western Norwayand the later national Landlaw refer to two principles of field divi-sion: (i) the simpler division into compact parts, and (ii) the moreintricate division into strips of equal length and breadth.92 The lat-ter principle led to a complicated field system that was to prevail inthe hamlet-like clustered farms in the west and north until the nine-teenth century. The subdivision of the fields could vary from care-fully arranged strips to plots without systematic arrangement. Eachfarmer would then dispose of a large number of scattered and inter-mingling strips and plots, but strips and plots of one group of hol-dings could also be allocated in one unit.93

The basic principle, generally well known in northern Europe,was that fields should be subdivided and distributed justly andequally.94 As elsewhere, distribution in Norway could be carried outby lottery, and we have already seen that reallocations could takeplace over time. The Gulathing Law stated that tenants could claimredistribution of fields when they leased or released a holding. Inprinciple this could then happen every year, as was the case in othernorth European countries, among them Ireland and Scotland.95

Unfortunately, there is little clear evidence of the degree towhich fields were worked in cooperation by the farmers of agglo-merated farms. In northern Norway it appears that both fields andmeadows could be farmed in common as a single unit. Ploughing,sowing and reaping could be done jointly and the crops shared inthe end.96 This was, however, hardly a common system. When stripsand plots were distributed among the farmers, as they more oftenwere, each of them would have the right to the produce of his ownshares. It would nevertheless be practical to work the open fieldstogether in ways that are known from later, but to what extent thiswas done in the Middle Ages is uncertain.

A traditional way of distinguishing between clustered farms,hamlets and villages has been the degree of social and economiccooperation and common obligations of the farmers. Although theclustered farms of Norway were hardly dependent on common cul-tivation and subject to fixed rules of working the soil to the samedegree as hamlets and villages in the neighbouring countries, traces


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of collective forms of farming can nevertheless be found. Theyinclude rules about permanent enclosures and the time for sendingthe cattle to pastures, which according to the Landlaw should beagreed by the farmers at a special meeting.97 There are even tracesthat resemble the organization of hamlets and villages in other partsof Scandinavia, with appointed farm bailiffs and farm courts,

98 theage and extent of which are, somewhat unclear, however.

When it is also taken into consideration that the extent of fixedfield systems and joint cultivation in the hamlets and villages of theneighbouring countries may have been exaggerated, there is muchto be said for reducing the traditional distinction between such sett-lements and the clustered farms of Norway.

Methods of cultivation

Generally, Norwegian Viking Age and medieval farming was mixed,but we have seen that the balance between arable farming andstockbreeding varied geographically. Grain-growing was mostimportant on the more extensive cultivable soils of Østlandet,Trøndelag and Jæren and in smaller areas of favourable conditionselsewhere, whereas pastoral farming generally played a greater rolein western and northern Norway. Consequently, there were markedregional differences with regard to the important relation betweencultivation and fallowing. In large parts of Trøndelag and Østlandetthe supply of animal manure was limited in relation to the arableland, which made regular fallowing necessary in order to preservethe fertility of the soils. In areas where the scale of cultivation wasmore limited in relation to the keeping of livestock, continuouscropping without fallow periods was made possible by the amplesupply of manure for fields that because of their limited extentcould also be worked more intensively.

Manure was not the only fertiliser. Fields could also be fertilisedwith turf from outlying areas, humus supplied from nearby woodsor by beat burning, seaweed, algae and fish offal. In westernNorway, archaeology has disclosed that long-term transformationof soils by the supply of turf and humus started in the early Iron Ageand was intensified in the Viking period and Middle Ages.99 Thiswas also a common practice in other areas of Scandinavia andaround the North Sea at this time.100

Rotational farming in Norway can be traced back at least to thetwelfth century, as mentioned in the Frostathing law of Trøndelag.Here the tenants were obliged to keep a minimum number of ani-mals relative to the amount of seed sown, in order to prevent


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exhaustion of the soil101: Every year a quarter of the arable was to beleft fallow and fenced in for the animals to graze and trample it sothat it would be naturally manured, implying a kind of “fold-cour-se system”. Manure accumulated during the winter was to be spreadon the fallow soils. These regulations were repeated in the Landlawof 1274,102 now probably applied to the grain-growing districts ofØstlandet as well.

There is, however, no mention of fallowing and obligatorymanuring in the Gulathing law of Vestlandet, where the supply ofmanure and other fertilisers was apparently ample enough to makecontinuous cropping a normal method of cultivation. Here too,domestic animals could be herded together in temporary folds orpens, where they trod the ground and fertilised it with their drop-pings.103 In outfields the folding of stock during summer could bea means of preparing the ground for cultivation the followingspring.

That Norwegian farmers should continue to sow every year orleave the land fallow only every fourth year meant that the country’ssmall proportion of cultivable land was quite intensively exploitedand implies that the productivity of the arable land was relativelyhigh. However, other fallow systems may also have been practi-sed.104 Thus, outfield plots could apparently only be cultivatedoccasionally in combination with continuous cropping of the in-field. The Norwegian field systems were altogether flexible, butgenerally more irregular and small-scale than the two- and three-field systems of Denmark and the more fertile areas of Swedenwhere fields lay fallow in a two- or three-year cycle. Two-field rota-tion may also have reached parts of Østlandet and Trøndelag whilecontinuous cropping on its part continued in more peripheral partsof Sweden, particularly on moraine soils.

Barley and oats were the predominant crops in Norway; theywere sown over most of the country, separately or together. Croprotation appears to have been introduced in the early Middle Ageswith sowing of rye in the autumn, barley and oats in the spring –a practice that was common in Atlantic Europe generally. The firstclear evidence of winter rye in Norway is its mention in theGulathing Law in connection with the clearing new land in theoutfields.105 Wheat was also sown to a smaller degree and the mixof crops was adapted to local needs and conditions. The cultivati-on of more than one species of grain would reduce the risks ofpoor harvests in an uncertain climate. Grain was grown as high as800 m above sea-level in the inner valleys of Østlandet,106 higherthan the present grain border, which demonstrates the importan-ce that was attached to such cultivation even on marginal soils.


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Animal husbandry and the use of the waste

Pastoral farming was important all over Norway and particularly inthe western and northern parts of the country where the areas ofcultivable land were most limited in relation to the uncultivableareas of forest, moorland, marshland and mountainous terrain thatconstituted most of the land surface in all parts of the country. Thewealth of grazing and other fodder resources of outfields and was-teland gave Norwegian farming a special character and position ina north European perspective, which it shared with more periphe-ral parts of Sweden and the north Atlantic islands that were settledby Norse colonists in the Viking Age. These were resources thatwould more than compensate for the small acreage of arable land on many farms. Subsistence was, however, in such cases dependenton the opportunities for households to exploit large areas for gra-zing, hay-making, foraging, forestry, hunting, fishing and otheractivities. Considerable manpower was needed for this, and in somecases also costly equipment and financial strength.

The numbers of species of domestic animals and their proporti-onate importance from farm to farm cannot be accurately measu-red, as the source material is fragmentary and considerable geo-graphic and social variations occurred. The oldest written informa-tion is Ottar’s account of his farm in northern Norway around 890,where he kept 20 cows, 20 sheep, 20 pigs and an unknown numberof horses for ploughing. According to the Gulathing Law a heard of6 cows was the norm for a smallholding in Vestlandet,107 implyingthat most farms had larger stocks. A paragraph in the FrostathingLaw may indicate that a stock of 12 cows was normal on the farmsof Trøndelag, about the same size as recorded in this region in theseventeenth century.108 On the smaller holdings of Østlandet astock of 4 cows, 2 oxen, 6 sheep and a pig appears to have been quitenormal, while some of the best farms could have up to about 25cows plus oxen, horses, sheep and pigs. In one of the upland valleysof Østlandet there is even recorded a stock of 60 cows around 1350.Archaeological and written evidence show that the length of cow-sheds could vary from about 7–8 metres on east Norwegian farmsof normal size to more than 20 metres on smaller west Norwegianfarms, indicating the greater relative importance of cattle farmingin Vestlandet.109

Cattle were by far the most important domestic animals, but aconsiderable number of sheep were also kept, particularly along thecoast where the mild winters in the west made it possible for themto graze all-year-round, and in highland areas where both sheepand goats could make particularly good use of the mountain pastu-


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res. The importance of pigs is hard to estimate but they appear tohave been a smaller but nevertheless integral part of the livestock.Oxen were kept as draught animals together with horses, the latteralso with more prestigious riding and transport functions in theupper strata of rural society. Poultry can also be documented al-though the amount is unknown.

Whereas grain was increasingly imported to Norwegian towns,particularly Bergen, and the fishing districts along the western andnorthern coast in the high Middle Ages, the produce of animal hus-bandry was more than sufficient to supply the whole population,including townspeople, fishermen and clergy, so that there was evensome export of animal products, particularly hides and skins andsome butter.110 The archaeological bone material from medievaltowns would seem to indicate that about 90 per cent of the meatconsumed there derived from cattle. The low slaughter age of oxendocumented by the animal bones from Bergen, mostly less thanfour years, implies that they were raised to a large extent as meatanimals beside their function as draught animals.111

Long before the Viking period the grazing resources of more dis-tant, high-lying areas in valleys and mountains were exploited bythe use of seasonally occupied sites (Old Norse sing. and pl. sætr),comparable to British shielings. People would move with livestockto sætr huts and pastures in the summer season and worked withdairy production, the collection of winter fodder and berries, hun-ting, fishing and partly also the production of iron from lakes orbog ore. The sætr system made it possible to keep larger stocks than


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Present and past sizes ofcattle, horses, sheep andpigs. Medieval breeds weresmall compared to the pres-ent ones.(Adapted from Øye, 2002)


could be supported by the lands of the farms proper. The field evi-dence for the system112 included place names and from the highMiddle Ages also the written evidence of laws and records.Toponymy in particular bears witness to the fact that sætr werepushed further and further into the upland valleys and mountainsas colonization progressed in the Viking period and followingMiddle Ages.

Three different types of sætr systems existed in Norway, all ofthem going back at least to the Middle Ages, and all types could beused in combination.113 The first type was located within the farmarea itself, normally in the outfields within the farm’s boundary.This was common in western and northern Norway. The secondtype, common in the upland areas of Østlandet and Trøndelag,seems primarily to have been connected with hay-making and thecollection of other types of fodder. The third sætr type of uplandvalleys and mountains, where people and animals stayed through-out the summer months, could consist of two or three interconnec-ted sites at different altitudes, so that the livestock was moved gra-dually higher as the summer progressed.

The provincial laws, the Landlaw and records yield evidence ofwasteland that might be common in principle but where in fact theestablishment of sætr was by no means open for every man. InVestlandet, the Gulathing law reveals a system by which individualfarms and their holdings had established customary rights to sætrsites in the commons whereas grazing was in principle free for alllivestock. In Trøndelag and Østlandet it appears that the establish-ment of sætr sites was to a larger extent a common right of thefarms of adjacent settlements and there is evidence that eastNorwegian farms could share sætr sites. Generally, one gets theimpression that the common wasteland used for sætr and othertypes of exploitation was far from being a no-man’s land by the highMiddle Ages. Farms or groups of farms had established exclusivecustomary rights and the areas were subject to a fairly strict systemof use and management.114

A major part of the work in outfields and wasteland, whetherconnected with sætr or not, was the time-consuming labour of gat-hering winter fodder – grass, leaves, moss, heather, twigs, and evenfish offal and different species of seaweed along the coast. Even ifanimals, particularly sheep and goats, could graze through the mildwinters of the outer coastal districts of western Norway, the generalsituation was that the stock had to be supplied with fodder about200 days a year, from October to May.115


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Tradition or innovation?

The population growth in the Viking period and the Middle Ageswould not have been possible without increased food production.An introductory question mark has already been placed behind thetraditional assumption that Norwegian farming and farming sys-tems of this period were static, fostering the neo-Malthusian scena-rio of food production that was not able to cope with the demandsof an increasing population.116 There are indications that this noti-on may be too negative as has already been mentioned. Not only dida growing population and an increased input of labour lead to theclearing of reserves of cultivable land and more intensive exploita-tion both of such land and wasteland. Instances of improved far-ming methods have also been touched upon. We can now considertraces of agricultural improvement and innovation together withtheir implications for the productivity of farming.

Manual work was all-important throughout the whole periodunder consideration, as cultivation, harvesting, collection of fodderand other exploitation of the wasteland never ceased to demand avery high input of labour. However, we have seen that the organiza-tion of labour changed with the disappearance of slavery, the alter-native hiring of free labour and not least the expansion of tenantedfarming. Conceivably, the self interest of tenants and their familieswould make them more productive than forced labour, and thismay also have been the case with free servants and wage labourerscompared to slaves. The effect of such social and economic chang-es cannot be measured but the probability of a positive influence onagricultural productivity should not be overlooked.

The individual’s agricultural production capacity was limited bywhat today appears as to be primitive technical equipment. A smallrange of tools, many of which were multipurpose, also showed aremarkable consistence throughout centuries over most of thecountry. However, there was one way of making the simple woodenfarming implements more effective, namely to improve their effec-


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tiveness and durability by sheathing the working parts with iron ormaking them of iron all through. The growth of iron production inthe period made this increasingly possible with positive effects forthe farming equipment used for cultivation, harvesting and exploi-tation of the wasteland, such as spades, axes, picks, sickles and scyt-hes. Iron shares and sockets of hoes, ard ploughs, sickles and the likeappear as grave-goods from the seventh century in Norway.117

The light ard plough, which had been used for cross-ploughingfor several millennia, was now strengthened by an iron share butcould still only break up the ground surface and move it withoutturning it over. Considerable manual labour had consequently to beused to supplement the work of the plough animals. In Sweden,iron-shod spades have been found from the early eleventh centu-ry118 and were probably used from about the same time in Norway.The iron-shod hoe may well have been the common tillage imple-ment in the Viking Age over large parts of the country to judge fromits distribution in pre-Christian graves.119

In north-western Europe, the twelfth and thirteenth centuriesrepresented a boom period for improved farming technology andmethods,120 and this was a development that made itself felt inNorway as well. Technological novelties, new crops and breeds,novel methods, physical and tenurial reorganization had alreadyappeared in the Viking Age and continued to be introduced andspread in the following Middle Ages up to and including the thirte-enth century, especially in the south-eastern and most fertile areasof the country.

Tillage equipment and methods underwent important changes.One of them was the introduction and increasing use of the ploughfrom the Viking Age. It had a ploughshare made wholly of woodcovered with a thin asymmetrical iron-sheath, and presumably alsoa fixed mouldboard that would help to turn the ground surfaceover. The archaeological evidence for medieval ploughs in Norwayis very scarce, and consists only of iron shares and coulters from theearly part of the period. Norwegian specimens of asymmetricalplough and symmetrical ard sheaths dating from the Viking periodare generally very light, while medieval specimens known throughwritten records were much heavier, up to 7 kg.121 The two plough-ing tools – the traditional light ard and the new mouldboard plough– existed side by side and were used for different purposes and ondifferent soils. Here the advantage of the plough was that it coulddeal with heavier soils than the ard but the two implements couldalso complement each other in the working of fields. Traces ofploughing and correspondent field systems have been uncovered,including medieval high-ridged fields in the Oslofjord region.122 It


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should, however, be noticed that traces of the wheeled mouldboardplough that could best deal with heavier soils, have so far not beenfound in Norway.

Tillage efficiency was improved by the introduction and increa-sing use of horses as draught animals. Horses were faster but alsomore expensive than oxen, and were used for ploughing in Norwayalready in the Viking Age, as attested by Ottar’s account of his farmin northern Norway around 890.123 Horses did not oust oxen asdraught animals; both species were used in the high Middle Ages,reflecting an ambivalent attitude to their qualities as plough ani-mals,124 but the partial shift to horses seems to have happened ear-lier in Norway than for instance in Denmark and Sweden,125 andmay be explained by their suitability for small peasant operations.Although they were individually more expensive than oxen, horseshad the advantage of being not only stronger and faster but alsomultifunctional – being useful in ploughing, harrowing, hauling,riding and as pack animals. The development of more effective har-nessing and of horseshoes in the early Middle Ages made it possibleto use horses more effectively in agricultural work. The breast har-ness seems to have replaced the throat harness in the ninth andtenth centuries126 and light iron horseshoes are documented fromthe eleventh century in Norway.127

Harrowing made it possible to break heavy clods and weeds,cover the seed, spread manure and reduce the laborious task ofhoeing, and may have been introduced in Norway together with themouldboard plough. The medieval harrows were rectangular withtines of wood, but other forms may well have existed. The earliest


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Motif from a tapestry of theOseberg burial, showingharnessing of horses aroundthe mid-ninth century.(Adapted from ØyeSølvberg, 1976)


harrow in Norway is mentioned in an Eddic poem that reflects con-ditions in the Viking Age.128 Dung forks for spreading manure aftersowing are also known as a new tool from the Viking Age129 and maybe connected with the general intensification of arable cultivation,

Drainage technology, which developed along the North Sea inthe Middle Ages, has been regarded as irrelevant for Norwegianmedieval agriculture. Drainage by digging ditches on the edges offields for the accretion of water and improvement of the soil can,however, be documented in eastern Norway in the fourteenth cen-tury and may have been more common than previously assumed. 130

It was harvesting that required the greatest amount of manuallabour. Technological improvements that made this a less time-con-suming work were therefore of great importance. In the hay-making the short-handled scythe had been used from the Iron Ageand was still in use throughout the Middle Ages. It was, however,increasingly superseded by the long-handled scythe, probably fromthe thirteenth century.

From the same time it appears that forks were introduced andthat a new type of wooden rake was used to turn the hay, gather ittogether and stack it.

In the harvesting of grain, the sickle with an iron blade stilldominated as a tool in the Viking Age but with more differentiated


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The long-handled scythe developed during theMiddle Ages. Here painted as a calendar motif ofJuly in Margrete Skuledatter’s psalter from the firstpart of the thirteenth century.


forms than earlier. Their distribution as grave-goods indicatesadaptation to different regional farming landscapes in the westernand eastern parts of the country. By the high Middle Ages the sicklemay have been supplemented by a scythe as a grain-reaping imple-ment.131 The cutting edge of sickles could either be smooth or toot-hed and the latter form may have been connected with the harves-ting of tough-strawed winter rye.132

The flail was introduced in Scandinavia between 1000 and 1200,resulting in more effective threshing making it easier to cope withthe increased grain production. The further processing of grain wasfacilitated by the construction of water mills and querns. Theyappeared in Norway from the late twelfth century at the latest and,many of them were built by ecclesiastical institutions and aristocra-tic landowners.133

At the end of the thirteenth century Norwegian agriculture hadlargely reached a technical level equivalent to the period that prece-ded the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. Most of the techniques which Europe was familiar withwere known in Norway at the end of the thirteenth century. Manyof the innovations that spread to Scandinavia, and were increasing-ly being used from the Viking period to the end of the high MiddleAges, had existed for centuries in southern parts of Europe. Theyreached the southern part of Norway at the same time as they wereintroduced in the rest of southern Scandinavia, horse ploughingand suitable harnessing as well as dung forks even slightly earlier.On the other hand, water mills appear a little later than in Denmarkand several centuries later than in England and Ireland.134

From the eleventh and twelfth centuries a more differentiatedselection of vegetables, fruits and spices, grown in horticultural en-closures, appeared in Norway – apples, plums, cabbage, angelica,turnips, leek, onions and various sorts of legumes (peas, beans andvetches) as well as hops. Hemp may also be a new crop from thisperiod. The cultivation of rye expanded during the Middle Ages,not least because of the introduction of winter rye, involving croprotation. New technology and crops also led to changes in field lay-out and facilitated the cultivation of virgin land. The more syste-matic use of fallow periods and manure in Trøndelag andØstlandet, as indicated by the high medieval law-codes, conceivablyhelped to preserve and perhaps even increase soil fertility.

Finally, the building of more differentiated and durable farmbuildings probably had positive effects both on the productivity ofanimal husbandry and the storage of crops.

The various innovations and improvements of farming techno-logy and methods should be seen as a whole of interrelated ele-


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ments,135 connected with general trends in societal development. Asthe elements were generally interdependent it is difficult to giveindividual priority to any of them. For instance, the increased use ofiron to strengthen farming equipment, the use of the mouldboardplough and the introduction of winter rye and other crops all con-tributed to the land reclamation that served as an outlet of thepopulation growth, and led to an increased agricultural production.

However, innovations and improvements could appear in differentregional combinations, adapted to the particular ecotypes and envi-ronmental conditions. In areas where arable land was scattered andpatchy, as they were in western Norway, fields were still tilled with hoesand spades. Such tools were not only necessary for farmers who couldnot afford ploughs and draught animals, they could also lead to morethorough tilling of the soil and larger crops, as was the case in Jærenin the early modern period. In horticulture and the cultivation of tex-tile plants such as hemp and flax the plots were worked with spades.

When assessing the productivity of Norwegian Viking periodand medieval farming one must also take into consideration otheractivities than cultivation and animal husbandry, such as fishingand the exploitation of outfields and wasteland through forestryand tar production, quarrying of stone for various purposes(whetstones, mill stones, soapstone vessels etc.) and iron producti-on. Iron production was made more effective by a new type of fur-nace that was introduced in the late Iron Age and spread rapidly


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Drainage

Iron shod spades

Land clearing

Increasedsoil fertility

Improved axe?

Fallow periods

Harrows

New crops and crop rotation

Strongerploughs

More effectiveharnessing

Horse shoes

The medieval agrarian innovations were interconnected. Heavier and more solid equipment made it easier to clearand cultivate heavy soils. Ploughing expanded because of better harnessing and equipment for horses.(Adapted from Øye, 1999)


over wide inland areas in the Viking period and Middle Ages toabout 1300.136 Forestry became more important from the thirte-enth century as Norway started to export timber to the British Islesand the north-western continent.

By far the most important exports from high medieval Norwaywere dried fish (stockfish) and to a smaller extent other fish pro-ducts such as fish oil and herring. This trade started in earnest inthe early twelfth century and expanded rapidly throughout the restof the high Middle Ages.137 This would stimulate the further deve-lopment of a fisher-farmer economy in the northern and westerncoastal districts where commercial seasonal fishing made it possiblefor the fishermen to buy imported grain and other commodities.They would then often reduce their arable farming on marginalsoils but go on keeping livestock for the need of their households.

The Crown, ecclesiastical institutions and private landownersappear to have played an important entrepreneurial role in the pro-cess of agricultural innovation and the development of industriessuch as iron production, forestry and not least commercial fishing.Their surplus in kind from land rent, taxation and other incomeswas channelled into foreign trade, which would stimulate the pro-duction of the commodities in question. The new towns where theinternational commercial centre of Bergen was particularly impor-tant, were not only channels of the exports of farming and relatedeconomic activities but also of foreign agricultural impulses, as seennot least in the development of horticulture.138 The extent to whichthe farmers themselves were behind improvement and innovationis hard to assess but one should not underestimate the capability ofreorientation in the farming population.

Sufficient food production?

Altogether, there is little doubt that agricultural food production inNorway increased throughout the Viking period and the followingMiddle Ages up to about 1300. This was not only the result of a high-er input of labour per acre – in land clearing, cultivation, collectionof fodder and various wasteland activities. Improvement and inno-vation in farming technology and methods must also have contri-buted considerably to the increased output.

Grain-growing, which gave the highest calorific output per acre,came to be carried out wherever it was possible, and domestic pro-duction may have been higher than it was in the early modern peri-od, as indicated by a tithe-based estimate of west Norwegian grainoutputs around 1340.139 The new leguminous plants possessed a


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higher nutritional value than grain and would, to the degree thatthey were used, improve the diet. They would also increase the sup-ply of soil nitrogen, but hardly on a scale that changed the role ofmanure as the major fertiliser. Like vegetables fruit was probablyrather uncommon in the earliest period but seems to have gainedimportance in the high Middle Ages, when fruit-growing can bedocumented in districts that have later specialized in this type ofhorticulture, particularly the fjord districts of Vestlandet.140 Theexports of the expanding commercial fisheries, and to some extentof animal husbandry and wasteland industries too, made it possibleto import foreign grain to supplement domestic production in thefishing districts of northern and western Norway.

There is thus considerable Norwegian evidence to support thetheory of Ester Boserup, referred to in the introduction, that popu-lation growth in pre-industrial societies will stimulate agriculturalimprovement and innovation and lead to increased food producti-vity. The neo-Malthusian notion of a population that outgrew itsmeans of subsistence should thus not be accepted out of hand.

Both medieval and post-reformation agriculture was, however,characterized by low yields and productivity. Generally, farmersaround the year 1300 could not expect to harvest more than aboutthree times the grain they sowed – provided that conditions wereabout the same as in the seventeenth century. Even though the out-put could vary greatly from district to district, with higher yields inthe best grain-growing areas such as Jæren, 141 there were thus limitsto how much the cultivable land could produce.

The scarcity of quantifiable evidence makes it impossible tomeasure the relation between food supply and population sizethroughout the period that has been dealt with in this presentation.Any assessment of the development of living standards will therefo-re be tentative and fraught with uncertainty. However, a safe con-clusion is that the increase in agricultural food production did notsignificantly log behind the growth of population in the early partof the period. These two processes were closely interdependent.

During the thirteenth and early part of the fourteenth centuriesthere are indications that living conditions worsened for many peo-ple in rural society. Agricultural settlement reached a geographicalextent that has never been exceeded, and the numerous tenantfamilies who eked their living out of smallholdings on land ofmodest or low quality must have found it hard to support themsel-ves. Cottagers, wage labourers and servants were even worse off.The indications of population stagnation and even the beginning ofdecline that has been outlined above should be ascribed to theincreasing difficulty of making a new living out of farming.


127


This does not mean that an absolute limit had been reached forhow many people a large and still sparcely populated country suchas Norway could support. Even though there are indications of cer-tain crisis phenomena from the mid-thirteenth century, contempo-rary sources do not convey an impression of general populationpressure and distress. It was probably still possible to make a reaso-nable living on many of the farms that were abandoned as a conse-quence of the dramatic loss of population caused by the BlackDeath and the following epidemics of plague in the late MiddleAges.

However, the situation at the end of the high Middle Ages wasnot favourable for further agricultural expansion and the difficulti-es of establishing an economic basis for new farming families mayhave led to the demographic stagnation indicated above. Althoughthe causes probably are complex and hard to deduce directly fromthe sources, the inherent mechanisms in rural societies towards selfregulation and the ability to maintain subsistence observed in laterperiods may have resulted in a lower marriage rate and also perhapsof marriage at a later age for both males and females, thereby redu-cing the high fertility rate that had contributed to the growth ofpopulation up to the thirteenth century.

In conclusion, it is clear that Norwegian farming and farmingsystems changed considerably from ca. 800 to ca. 1350, involvingthe farmers’ social and economic status, their household organiza-tion, farm houses, farm territories and rural landscapes. The yieldsof farming increased at least up to the mid-thirteenth century, as aresult of land clearing and more intensive and improved cultivationof arable and corresponding exploitation of outfields and waste-land. Whatever relation there was between the growth of agricultu-ral production and population it seems evident that farming andfarming systems in the period were not static. However, we haveseen that developments were not unilinear or uniform all over thecountry; there were considerable regional differences.

Although domestic agricultural conditions differed from thosein more southerly European regions, there has been a tendency tooveremphasize the uniqueness of Norwegian farming. It shouldtherefore be noted that there are also striking similarities betweenthe development of Norwegian medieval farming and farming sys-tems, particularly in the southern part of the country, and those ofsouthern Scandinavia and northern Europe in general.


128



129

T R Ø N D E L A G

V E S T L A N D E T

Ø S T L A N D E T

FINNMARK

TROMS

NORDLAND

TELEMARK

Jämtland

AGDERJæren Bohuslän

Bergen

Sogndal

Borgund

Oslo

Trondheim

Karlsøy

Malangen

Norway with its medieval boundaties and places mentioned in the text.


Notes:

1 Adam: p. 211.

2 Helle 1995: p. 3ff.

3 Cf. Øye Sølvberg 1976: pp. 27–31, Mook & Salvesen 1988 with references, Lamb 1995.

4 Bratrein 1996: p. 10.

5 Øye Sølvberg 1976: pp. 24–27, Helle 1995a: pp. 5–14.

6 Cf. Brush & Turner 1987: pp. 11–13.

7 Helle 1995: p. 31.

8 Boserup 1965: p. 12ff.

9 Helle 1974: p. 158; Idem p. 1995a: 54, Sandnes & Salvesen 1978: p. 110.

10 Sandnes & Salvesen 1978: p. 117.

11 A.o. Berglund 1995, T. Iversen 1996, F. Iversen 1999a.

12 Referred to in the Icelandic Landnámabok: p. 248, p. 289, p. 328, p. 362.

13 Helle 1974: p. 160, p. 238 with references.

14 Duby 1998: p. 19.

15 Helle 1974: p. 51.

16 Reynolds 1994: p. 53, T. Iversen 1995: p. 174, Skre 1999: p. 124.

17 Cf. T. Iversen 2001, Myking 2002.

18 Helle 2001: p. 119 with references.

19 A.o. claimed by Holmsen and O.A Johnsen. Cf. Hansen 1999 referring to this debate.

20 Robberstad, KLNM XII: pp. 493–497.

21 Cf. a.o. NiYR III: pp. 68–73, pp. 76–99, pp. 144–48, p. 225, p. 276: NiYR: pp. 13–18.

22 L V 7.

23 Ibid.

24 A. o. Lunden 1995, T. Iversen 1995, 1996, 1999, Skre 1998, 1999, Dørum 1999 a & b.

25 T. Iversen 1995, Skre 1998.

26 T. Iversen 1996, F. Iversen 1998, Idem 1999a and b, Berglund 1995.

27 G 75; F XIII 4, L VII 10, 52.

28 Winchester 1987: p. 102 (about Cumbria), Poulsen 1997: p. 125.

29 Cf. Øye 2002: p. 302.

30 G145.

31 Cf. Øye 2002: p. 367ff with references.

32 Cf. Krag 1995: p. 85 for discussion of this term.

33 Severeal locations have been suggested: Bjarkøy (Sandmo 1994: p. 174), Helgøy (Bratrein 1989: pp.

175–76), Senja or Hillesøy (Odner 1983: p. 23).

130


34 Mundal 1996: p. 106, L. Olsen 1998: p. 53; Bratrein 1996: p. 13.

35 Odner 1989: pp. 148–149, Bratrein 1989: p. 199, Hansen 1990: p. 118, Storli 1994: p. 16.

36 I. Zachrisson 1997, L. Olsen 1998.

37 Archaeological excavations have demonstrated that farms traditionally dated to the Late Iron Age and

Middle Ages can be older (Øye (ed.) 2002).

38 Bratrein 1989: p. 195, p. 201, Bertelsen 1994: p. 203.

39 Skre 1997: p. 47, Solberg 2000: p. 150.

40 F. Iversen 1998, 1999a & b, T. Zachrisson 1998: p. 167.

41 F. Iversen 1999a.

42 The following account of place-names is mainly based on Akselberg 1996.

43 NgL II: 420.

44 Sandnes & Stemshaug 1980: p. 260, Harsson 1990: p. 76.

45 Sandnes 1971: p. 43 with references, Andersen 1977: p. 210.

46 Sandnes 1971: p. 46, Marthinsen 1996: p. 155.

47 Marthinsen 1996.

48 Dodgshon 1980.

49 Cf. Sandnes 1979: p. 166, Bjørkvik KLNM: pp. 625–31.

50 Hertzberg 1895: p. 128.

51 Holmsen et al. 1956: p. 29.

52 Cf. Sandnes 1979: p. 166.

53 Bjørkvik 1956: p. 48, Salvesen 1996: p. 47.

54 Widgren 1997: p. 10, p. 116.

55 DN VI no 84, Øye 1986: p. 411.

56 Sandnes 1968, Lunden 1969, Idem 2000, Sandnes & Salvesen 1978, Marthinsen 1996.

57 L VII 53, 54; NgL: p. 484.

58 Bertelsen & Lamb 1995.

59 Øye 2000.

60 Porsmose 1981: p. 23, Liebgott 1989: p. 26.

61 Cf. Bjørkvik 1956: p. 50ff.

62 G 81.

63 Lunden 2000: p. 63.

64 Benedictow 1993.

65 Sandnes & Salvesen 1978.

66 Øye 2002: p. 251 with references.

67 Ibid: p. 393 with references.

68 Ibid: p. 266 with references.

69 Cf. Hybel 1989.

70 A.o. Sandnes 1971.

71 G 255, 296, 299; G 70.

72 Hkr II: p. 30.

73 T. Iversen 1997: pp. 39–40.

74 Sweden c. 1330: Myrdal 1999: p. 96, England c. 1100 Duby 1998: p. 193, p. 208, p. 269, p. 279.

75 T. Iversen 1997: p. 43.

76 Sandnes 1983.

77 F XIII 6, G 77, G 198, Cf. Helle 2001: pp. 127–28.

78 T. Iversen 1997: pp. 87–101.

79 Ibid: pp. 102–104.

Notes

131


80 G 106, F IX 11, Cf. T. Iversen 1997: pp. 217–18 and Helle 2001: pp. 129–130.

81 G 76; F XIII 2; L VIII 1.

82 Cf. Øye 2002: pp. 273–75 with references.

83 DN no 26.

84 Helle 1974: p. 156.

85 Porsmose 1988, Myrdal 1999: p. 173.

86 Cf. Øye 2002: p. 272.

87 Dodgshon 1980: p. 40.

88 Cf. Duby 1998: pp. 238–39, pp. 257–59, p. 274.

89 Hjulstad 1984: pp. 24–25.

90 Myrdal 1999: pp. 34–36, Porsmose 1988.

91 Berg 1989.

92 G 81; LVIII 15, Bjørkvik 1956.

93 Bjørkvik 1956, Idem 1959.

94 Cf. Dodgshon 1980: p. 26.

95 Ibid.: p. 38.

96 Bjørkvik 1956.

97 L VIII 30. Cf. Øye 2000: pp. 17–18.

98 Holmsen et al. 1956: p. 80.

99 Kaland 1987: p.179, Kvamme 1982: p. 57, Austad, Øye et al. 2001: p. 158.

100 Behre 1975, Poulsen 1997: p. 120, Hoppenbrowers 1997: p. 95.

101 F II 30, 34.

102 L VII 15.

103 Øye Sølvberg 1976: pp. 116–117.

104 Land could also be left follow for a longer period. Cf. Øye 2002: pp. 303–305.

105 G 75.

106 Høeg 1994: p. 17, Hosar 1994: p. 132.

107 G 6.

108 F IV 44, Sandnes 1971: p. 85, Øye Sølvberg 1976: p. 130.


110 Nedkvitne 1977, Idem 1983.

111 Øye 1998: pp. 48–50 with references.

112 The physical remains of such shielings, footings of rectangular dry stone huts and clusters of huts, have

survived and been investigated in several places, especially in mountainous areas in Western Norway

(Magnus 1986, Martinussen & Myhre 1985, Gustafsson 1982–83, Kvamme 1988, Bjørgo et al. 1992,

Skrede 2002) and more sporadically in the uplands of Østlandet (Block-Nackerud & Lindblom 1994,

Bergstøl 1997, Narmo 2000).

113 Reinton 1955–61, Øye 2002: pp. 369–76.

114 Cf. Øye 2002: pp. 373–76 with references.

115 Timberlid 1988.

116 Holmsen 1961: p. 260. Cf. Postan 1973.

117 Petersen 1951.

118 Myrdal 1997: p. 160. In England in the 10th cent. (Astill 1997: p. 207).

119 Øye Sølvberg 1976: pp. 106–110.

120 Cf. Astill & Langdon 1997.


122 Jerpåsen 1996.

Notes

132


123 Cf. Øye Sølvberg 1976: p. 95.

124 Cf. Øye 2002: p. 334.

125 Poulsen 1997: p. 131; Myrdal 1997: p. 163.

126 Øye Sølvberg 1976: pp. 95–97, Astill 1992: p. 94.


128 Found in the Oseberg burial; Øye Sølvberg 1976: p. 105 with references.

129 Ibid. pp. 195–106.


131 Øye Sølvberg 1976: p. 120.

132 Øye Sølvberg 1976: pp. 117–120 with references, cf. Poulsen 1997: pp. 136–39.

133 Øye 2002: pp.345–347 with references.

134 Poulsen 1997: p. 138, Astill 1997.

135 Cf. Myrdal 1997 denoting these interdependent changes as a technological complex.


137 Nedkvitne 1977, idem 1983.

138 Øye 1998.

139 Lunden 1978, 262, Øye 1986: p. 330.

140 Øye 1998.

141 Lindanger 1987: p. 173.

Notes

133


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Documents

Øye (Ingvild)_Agricultural Conditions and Rural Societies CA. 800-1350. an Introduction