Land rights and agricultural innovation in medieval Norway 800-1350

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Ingvild ye
Farming systems and rural

societies ca. 8001350
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Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350
Agricultural conditions and rural

societies ca. 8001350 an introduction
On account of the roughness of its mountains and the immoderate
cold, Norway is the most unproductive of all countries, suited only
for herds ... Poverty has forced them thus to go all over the world
and from piratical raids bring home in great abundance the riches
of the land. In this way they bear up under the unfruitfulness of
their own country (Adam of Bremen).1
Previous page:
Adam digs and Eve spins.
Detail of the vaulting from
l stave church. Late thirteenth century. Now in the
University Museum of
Cultural Heritage, Oslo.
80
Two adjectives spring to mind at the start of an overview of

Norwegian farming and rural life in the Viking period and the
Middle Ages poor and remote; just as stated by Adam of Bremen
in the 1070s. Norways situation on the northern fringes of Europe
and its tough physical environment made it a distant and harsh
region in the eyes of foreigners further south. Sedentary settlement
was fragmented and limited in extent by vast tracts of mountainous
terrain, forests, moors, swampland, lakes and tarns. Until the present day hardly more than 3 per cent of the total land mass has been
under cultivation.2
Compared with the neighbouring countries and more southerly
parts of Europe, Norways broken topography and lack of arable
land may easily create the impression that its farming systems and
rural societies have been equally and uniformly atypical. However,
in this representation the considerable regional differences within
the country will be emphasized and similarities with other North
European countries considered. Although Norwegian farming may
seem comparatively marginal in a European perspective more nuances and broader complexity will emerge from closer inspection.
As the country stretches across thirteen degrees of latitude, climatic conditions vary considerably between the north and south
and also between the coast and inland areas, lowland and highland.
Generally the climate was somewhat warmer and dryer in the
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Viking and Middle Ages than it is today, with an optimum in ca.

9501200.3 As it still does, the wind-driven Gulf Stream brought
warm air and warm waters to the western and north-western coast,
reducing the temperature difference between southern and northern coastal districts and making grain-growing possible as far
north as around 70 N.4 Generally, the more sheltered inner areas of
the fjord districts of western and northern Norway had a dryer climate than the coastal areas, with warmer summers and colder winters, and this was also the case in the inland areas of eastern Norway
(stlandet), sheltered as they were from the humid westerly winds
by the high mountain range that separates them from western
Norway (Vestlandet).
Topographically, the agricultural landscape varied greatly, from
the relatively wide areas of comparatively flat land with fertile
marine and moraine deposits in south-eastern and central
stlandet and in central Norway (Trndelag) to the more uneven
and limited pockets of glacial and post-glacial deposits to be found
along the rest of the coast, by the fjords and in the valleys stretching
from sea to mountains. At the south-western fringe of Vestlandet
Vegetation regions in
Norway.
(Adapted from
Kunnskapsforlagets store
Norgesatlas)
Vegetation regions
Cultivated areas
The boreal region with coniferous
forests and mountain birch belt
The mountain region
Vesterlen
Lofoten
50
100
150 km
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the unique moraine plain of Jren, comprising 700 square kilometres, stands out from the more broken coastal landscape to the
north and south-east (cf. map p. 129). Outside the arable land everywhere there were reserves of pasture on more barren soils or in
areas climatically unsuitable for grain-growing; they were particularly abundant in the northern and western parts of the country
and generally in elevated terrain.5
In the course of the half millennium or so from ca. 800 to the
Black Death in 134950 the rural landscape was influenced by people interacting with it to suit their economic and social needs.
There was a fundamental interplay between population growth
and settlement expansion with extensive clearing of cultivable land
and pastures, a process that was also affected by far-reaching
changes at other levels of society. A surplus from farming was a
necessary condition for the process of territorial unification under
kings with national ambitions that started in the late ninth century, and the building up of a political organization that could bind
the kingdom together. Closely connected with this process was the
later conversion to Christianity with the establishment of a church
organization and the emergence of the first Norwegian towns,
equally dependent on the royal initiative and the yield from farming. These processes continued throughout the rest of the period
under consideration. They contributed significantly to shaping a
system of rights over land that changed the structure of medieval
rural society and influenced the development of farming. These are
all factors that will have to be taken into consideration in the following overview.
Here the concept of farming will be applied in a wide sense,
comprising both arable farming and animal husbandry, and taking
into consideration related economic activities by which the farming
population exploited other resources of the land and sea.
Additionally, the unifying concept of farming system will be used to
denote the interplay of factors such as land use, organization of the
resource areas, farming methods, environmental aspects, ownership
and management.6
The sources of farming and farming systems in the period
under consideration are still to a large part unwritten, comprising
varied archaeological finds, remains of farming structures and
practices above and under ground, palaeobotanical and zoological
material, topography etc. However, the research situation is greatly
improved by the fact that Norway in the late Viking period and
early Middle Ages started to enter the world of script. A more
abundant body of written historical evidence is preserved from the
following high Middle Ages. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries
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saw the recording in writing of a rich historical literature and

important law codes in Norway and Iceland, shedding light on
contemporary as well as past events and conditions, and from the
late thirteenth century recorded evidence becomes important. The
following representation will make use of most types of extant
written material, also the runic inscriptions that preceded the use
of script in the Latin alphabet.
Particularly important for the development of farming and
rural society are the place names that now appear in their oldest
known forms, and the provisions of the law codes. The latter are not
only normative; they also describe or reflect factual conditions, and
their more programmatic regulations can be compared with the
practices revealed by the increasingly important record material.
Two generations of medieval Norwegian legal codes have been
preserved: first, provincial codes that largely reflect the legal situation of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries but also contain
provisions dating further back; second, national codes from the
1270s. In the following decades the latter were amended and supplemented by royal regulations. Thus, it is possible to establish a
rough legal chronology for the period ca. 11001350 with elements
of even older legal situations. Two of the Norwegian provincial law
codes have been preserved more or less completely, the Gulathing
Law of western Norway and the Frostathing Law of Trndelag, revealing differences in the farming systems and rural societies of the
two regions, whereas not much more than the sections of Christian
laws remain of the east Norwegian codes of Eidsivathing (for the
inner part of stlandet) and Borgarthing (for the Oslofjord area).
Extensive revisions of the provincial codes started in the mid-thirteenth century, ultimately resulting in the national rural code of
1274, the so-called Landlaw, which brought together provisions of
the various provincial codes and new regulations.7
Altogether, there is more than sufficient evidence to substantiate
profound changes in Norwegian rural society ca. 8001350. Yet
there has long been a tendency to regard farming and farming systems as more or less static in the same period. This has fostered the
neo-Malthusian notion of a population that in the high Middle
Ages outgrew its means of sustenance; there was little agricultural
innovation in order to keep up with the population growth. What
there is of justification for this view should be investigated with a
view to the more optimistic gist of Ester Boserups studies, namely
that there will often be a positive correlation between population
density and agricultural productivity.8 We can now turn to the
question of innovation and change versus conservatism and stability, which will be discussed as a main problem.
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Land rights
Land rights is a critical factor in most agricultural systems often
in the form of more permanent ownership of land and the more or
less time-limited right to use it. How the two relate to each other is
usually indicative of social stratification and inequality. A series of
far-reaching changes in land ownership and rights of use occurred
in Norway ca. 8001350, as part of the general societal development
outlined above.
Distribution of ownership of land

The distribution of ownership of land cannot be roughly assessed
until the first half of the fourteenth century. By combining contemporary evidence with inferences drawn from later records, land
registers, tax-lists and the like (so-called regressive method) it has
been estimated that the Church owned about 40 per cent of the land
in present-day Norway in terms of taxable value, the secular aristocracy in the kings service about 20 per cent, and the Crown about
7 per cent, while the remaining 33 per cent was in the hands of freeholders meaning that they owned their own land.9
Freehold land was mostly found in more peripheral districts in
Agder and Telemark in the southern part of the country, in the
inland valleys and forest districts of stlandet and in certain fjord
and mountain areas of Vestlandet. Conversely, the landed estates of
Church, Crown and aristocracy were dominant in the best and most
centrally placed agricultural districts in the Oslofjord area, central
parts of stlandet, the coastal areas of Vestlandet from Jren northwards, most of Trndelag and parts of northern Norway.10 These
were the most densely settled parts of the country where the yields
of farming were at their highest and conditions most favourable for
creating 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 landed estates became particularly dominant.
This was an ownership pattern that reflected the development of
royal and ecclesiastical influence and organization in the preceding
centuries. Clearly, a major process of redistribution must have taken
place since the start of the Viking Age five hundred years earlier.
Larger estates in the hands of petty kings, chieftains and magnates
appear to have existed already at that time, particularly in the coastal areas,11 but their precise character and extent cannot be established. In the cause of the long drawn-out process of political unification under royal leadership the monarchy appears to have confiscated considerable amounts of land from defeated opponents, chieftains and magnates as well as freeholders. Much of this land was
given to ecclesiastical institutions, above all those founded by the
monarchy. Although the monarchy continued to acquire new land
throughout the high Middle Ages by confiscation during the century of Civil Wars from the 1130s, by claiming ownership to clearings in commons at least from the latter part of the twelfth century, and by receiving land as payment for fines, tax arrears etc. it
09%
1024%
2539%
4054%
5569%
Over 70%
200 km
Percentages of freehold in southern and

central Norway in 1661, generally reflecting the situation around 1300 as well.
(Adapted from Helle, 1991)
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seems clear that donations to ecclesiastical institutions, and also to

deserving liegemen in the royal hir or retinue, must altogether
have reduced the amount of royal land from what it may have been
at its unknown medieval maximum to the 7 per cent of the total
land value it seems to have constituted in the first half of the fourteenth century.
The amount of land possessed by chieftains and magnates in the
Viking Age was reduced by the confiscation of landed property
belonging to those who opposed the victorious representatives of
the monarchy during the unification struggles,12 and also by donations to ecclesiastical foundations. Magnates on the winning side in
the unification process up to and including the Civil Wars probably
took advantage of their position by acquiring land both from defeated equals and freeholders, or they were rewarded by gifts of land
from the king in whose hir they were organized and served. Yet it
seems doubtful whether the estimated 20 per cent of land owned by
the hir aristocracy towards the end of the high Middle Ages represented an increase in relation to the land controlled by chieftains
and magnates in the Viking Age.
It was the Church that came out as the great winner in the medieval quest for landed estates. From the official conversion to
Christianity started at the end of the tenth century to the first half
of the fourteenth century, share of the total land value owned by the
ecclesiastical institutions increased from zero to about 40 per cent.
At their foundation they often received clusters of land from kings
and magnates and continued to be given land by the same donors.13
From the late twelfth century, however, larger donations became
rarer as private landowners, following a common north European
practice, started to protect the land that formed the basis for their
social rank.14
In the meantime the Church had itself established an active
policy of land acquisition. At the establishment of a separate
Norwegian church province in 1152/1153, Cardinal Nicholas
Brekespear initiated a statute that was later included in the provincial laws, giving landowners the right to partly disregard the hereditary right of kin to land by donating up to one-tenth of inherited
and one-quarter of self-acquired land to other recipients.15 The
way was thus paved for a stream of pious gifts to the Church in the
form of smaller or larger shares of land, not least to local churches.
Ecclesiastical institutions also used their considerable income to
buy land, with or without the right of owners to redeem it, and
otherwise received it in payment of arrears of tithe and ecclesiastical fines and for providing food and lodging for elderly people in
their estates.
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The concept of ownership

The concept of ownership appears to have changed from the Viking
Age to the high Middle Ages. Control over land in the earlier period probably also included people, in the sense that farmers would
be personally dependent on chieftains and magnates, owing them
yields and services as well as support and loyalty in return for various favours and protection in the working of the land on which
they lived.16 Rights of property and use may have been intermixed
in a rather diffuse way, implying that different people had different
claims to the land.
In the provincial laws and the Landlaw, the rights of landed property are defined more clearly and in a more impersonal way. The
landowners right of property, and consequently of disposal, is
regulated in relation to the right of use in the form of tenancy, and
both of them have now become economic rights that do not involve personal dependency. Freeholders possessed all the rights to a
farm or holding in a way that corresponds to the modern concept
of property. However, in the case of landowners renting their land
to tenants it can be said that the right of property was divided to
some extent. The owners right was that of land rent and to varying
degrees of control according to his contract with the tenant, whereas the right of use of the latter could be far-reaching enough to
involve elements of what would today be regarded as property
rights.17 Both freeholders and tenants had rights to use land that
varied spatially within the resource area of the farm or holding they
worked, from more individual and exclusive rights in the infield to
rights that were customarily shared with other farmers in outlying
areas and wasteland.
There were also variations in the property rights to various categories of land, not only between freehold and tenanted land but also
between ancestral land, to which family and kin had certain rights,
and land that had been more recently cleared or acquired in transactions such as purchase, exchange, gift or pawn. Beside the rights
over land, descent was a pillar of social status in Norwegian rural
society. Ancestral land, handed over hereditarily from generation to
generation, was regarded as al (Old Norse). This was possibly a
concept that originally may simply have denoted inherited land in
general at a time when it was mainly transferred within the descent
group.18 The further traditional inference, that land was originally
the common property of kin, is, however, based on supposition rather than empirical evidence.19
As it appears in the provincial laws and the Landlaw, the right of
al was an individual right which in legally determined order pro87
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tected the hereditary right of descendants to land at a time when

this right had come under serious threat from other ways of acquiring it by purchase, gift, confiscation and other means. The al
right of the law codes includes not only the right to inherit the land
in question but also first refusal on buying or renting it, and to
reclaim it from other buyers if it has not been offered to the proper
heirs for sale.20 When men and women inherited together the al
provisions gave preference to patrilineal descent; in that case
women had no rights to al land but could acquire it in the probably not infrequent cases when legitimate male heirs were lacking.
Male co-heirs had equal rights to al land, which meant that it
would frequently be divided up between heirs, which would influence the settlement pattern. Runic inscriptions indicate that basic
elements 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 inherit
land from their parents if they had brothers, but on marrying they
might receive land as part of their dowry. The Landlaw of 1274 introduced the right of daughters to inherit from their parents just as sons
could do though with only half a brothers share.22 Otherwise all
heirs within the same legal degree of kinship, females as well as males,
had the right to an equally valued share of the total inheritance in
question, but this meant that al land would go to male heirs whereas women would receive their shares in other land and chattels.
The inheritance system, combined with the practice of giving
land in dowry or dower, led to excessive subdivision of landed property. A farm might be subdivided between co-heirs in various
ways. It could be split into physically divided parts or in intermixed
shares of equal value. From the various parts new offshoots could
be projected into the surrounding wasteland, or one heir might be
given the whole infield while the others were allowed to carve new
holdings out of the surrounding wasteland. Inheritance and marriage would thus often reduce the size of landed property units and
not infrequently result in smallholdings. Partible inheritance might
also over time lead to the formation of patrilocal groups, i.e. groups
of kin-related landholders clustered within a specific locality or dispersed over a wider territory.
Certain legal provisions were taken to stem the fragmentation of
farming units. One was the Landlaws prerogative for the eldest son
to 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 presupposed by the Landlaw, by which co-heirs could inherit shares of a farm
or holding from which they were entitled to land rent. Dowry or
dower could be meted out in the same fashion. A farm or holding
might thus be split up between various owners but still be preserved as a production unit under one farmer who paid the other
owners land rent. This appears to have been a main motive power
in the development of the tenancy system that appears in the provincial 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 that
did not fulfil the requirements of al land because it had been purchased, received in gift, confiscated, cleared or acquired by other
means than inheritance. Most of it was owned by the Crown, ecclesiastical institutions and larger secular landowners, and would be
farmed by tenants. By the first half of the fourteenth century most
Norwegian peasants were tenants, in whole or part, renting their
land from clerical or secular landowners. When taking into consideration the part of the freehold land that was worked by farmers
who paid land rent to the formal owners, tenants must have farmed
more than 70 per cent of the land according to value.
The genesis of tenancy in Norway is unclear, and has been debated a lot.24 It has already been mentioned that the presence of
Viking Age estates may imply various types of personally dependent landholders whereas the tenancy system of the provincial laws
and the Landlaw is more impersonal and uniform, based on strictly economic rights and obligations.25
However, there is only meagre and indirect evidence of the older
system of personally dependent tenure. Tenants seem to have been
located around main farms, often residential farms of petty kings,
chieftains and magnates.26 Such farms were probably to a large
extent worked by slaves and freed slaves who may also have played a
central role in the clearing of new land and the establishment of new
holdings, which they would then farm in dependence on their masters. Other farmers may have been freemen who owed the leading
magnates more honourable personal service and/or economic dues
in return for protection, gifts and other favours. In this fashion larger landed complexes could be built up around residential and other
main farms, bound together by various degrees of overlordship and
involving various kinds of dues, economic and other, to the overlord.
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From the early twelfth century at the latest the new impersonal
system of tenancy was in ascendancy, as witnessed by the provincial laws. According to this system the tenants were legally free persons who owed the landowners no other dues than the economic
obligations imposed by individual contracts within a legally defined
framework. Such tenants may partly have started out as freed slaves
(Old Norse: leysingjar) but over the years would rid themselves of
all traces of serfdom. The new system of tenancy was obviously
adapted to the more impersonal power basis of Crown, Church and
hir magnates and their need for a safe and stable income that
would allow them to pursue other activities than cultivating the
land. To a large extent they seem to have given up the working of
larger estates by help of slaves, freed slaves or paid labour in favour
of settling tenants on separate holdings.
Agreement on land lease

between tenant and landlord. Tenancy agreements
were often oral contracts
with two witnesses present
and finished with a handshake. Initial from the
Landlaw of 1274.
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Renting of land involved not only the right to farm a fixed extent
of arable land, but also a complex bundle of other rights such as
common rights of meadow and pasture, access to woodland and use
of parcels of land that could be held in severalty. In general, tenants
had a right to timber and wood for use on their farms and to build
their own boats.27 Corresponding rights are also known from
England and Denmark.28 Conversely, it was prohibited to take timber or wood out of the farm for profit. There was thus a tension between the rights of landowner and tenant over woodland, reflected
by legal provisions and a growing number of recorded individual
agreements.29 In late medieval records undifferentiated rights to
woodland, 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 economy
in most parts of Norway. The use of the wasteland included grazing,
gathering, hunting and fishing, fetching wood and timber. There
were also resources to be extracted for industrial uses: wood for
burning charcoal and tar, deposits of bog iron and other ores, stone
that could be quarried for various purposes.
The history of rights to wasteland has traditionally been presented as a gradual process of increasingly closer definition of rights in
response to population growth and dwindling reserves of outfields
and wasteland. It is a basic principle of the provincial laws and the
Landlaw that each man should have his customary rights to the
wasteland. In Vestlandet such rights, namely to shielings and probably also to hunting and fishing, seem to have been established at
an early stage and are acknowledged by the Gulathing Law30 whereas commons as such were preserved to a greater degree in the rest of
the country. They could, however, be defined as the common
resources of certain settlements of farms or holdings and this would
open the way for cooperative exploitation in the summer season.31
In spite of the above-mentioned royal property right to clearings
the 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 northern
Norway and his extensive travels at home and abroad. He professed
to live northernmost of all Norflmen Norsemen.32 Further north
was the territory of the more or less nomadic Finns or Saami who
eked their living out of hunting, gathering and fishing.
Ottars residence was somewhere in the southern part of the present county of Troms.33 Here the fjord of Malangen, south of the
present town of Troms, seems to have constituted a kind of administrative borderline between Finnmark, the area belonging to the
Saami, and the more southerly area of farming Norse settlers (Old
Norse: bmenn). However, the divide between the two groups was
not clear-cut, neither with regard to ways of living nor territories
inhabited. Around AD 1000 , at the latest, part of the Saami population could also combine hunting and fishing with some husbandry34 and Norse coastal farmers also exploited the resources of the
sea. North of Malangen, Norse coastal settlers have been traced as
far up as the island of Karlsy north of Troms in Ottars days whereas the Saami could occupy heads of fjords south of Malangen35
and exploited the inland mountain plateaus as far south as
Trndelag and even areas of stlandet bordering on Sweden.36
In the half millennium from AD 800 the Norwegian farming
communities worked profound changes in the rural landscape.
Clearing of new land and the subdivision of old farms transformed
the layout of the farmland and the organization of farms. New
fields, farms and settlements were established at the cost of forest
and other wasteland. Nevertheless, vast uncultivated areas remained, offering other resources that could be put to use. Not least was
the expansion of arable land closely connected with an extensive
exploitation of outlying areas for animal husbandry. Arable farming provided fodder for the livestock, which in return provided
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draught animals and manure, crucial for maintaining the fertility of

the arable land, but the balance between agriculture and animal
husbandry would vary with the natural conditions from district to
district and also to some extent over time.
Settlement expansion depended on the availability of land suited for colonization. Consequently, there were great variations from
region to region. From the Viking Age stlandet had the greatest
reserves of cultivable land, which resulted in a particularly strong
growth of population in the high Middle Ages. Other coastal and
inland areas, particularly in Vestlandet, had smaller reserves of
arable land, but both here and further north there were vast outlying areas suitable for the collection of fodder, other gathering and
hunting, vitally supplemented by fishing along the coast. As a
whole, the country represented different types of landscapes with
distinctive physical differences and cultural identities as well as differences in ownership, building patterns, farming and farming
structures.
Population growth was obviously a main cause of the process
of land clearance, which seems to have seriously started in the
eight century or perhaps even earlier,37 and continued towards the
end of the high Middle Ages. Although the main trend was expansive, contractions and the abandonment of farms and farmland
also occurred, as was the case in northern Norway in the eleventh
century, followed by expansion in the twelfth century.38 In most
regions, population growth and settlement expansion appear to
have come to a halt in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth
centuries.
In its main outlines Norwegian land clearance and subdivision
followed parallel medieval developments in many northernEuropean countries. What were the more specific characteristics of
these processes in Norway, and were there noticeable differences
between Norway and other countries?
Land clearing and subdivision of farms

Generally, the beginning of the period under consideration is poorly documented. Research has to be based mainly on toponymy,
archaeological and botanical (pollen) evidence, combined with
inferences drawn from later and better documented conditions.
Burial mounds were not the common way to bury the dead in
the Viking Age or earlier. On freehold farms they seldom occurred
more than once per generation39 and generally less frequently, and
are often interpreted as visible manifestations of the first settlers
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who cleared the land. They can, however, also be taken as demarcations of ancestral freehold land. Placed centrally in settlements or
near their boundaries, the mounds would then define and symbolize the inherited territories of patrilinear groups.40 Generally, burial mounds seem to occur more rarely in areas that are later known
as parts of larger estates, indicating that these estates date back to
the Viking period or earlier. Statistical concurrence of burial
mounds and freehold farms and the lack of such conjuncture between burial mounds and estates have so far been best documented
in Vestlandet.41 The distribution of burial mounds may thus reflect
the establishment and continued existence of both freehold farms
and estates.
The rich heritage of prehistoric and medieval place names
results in a more detailed understanding of the development of
rural settlement.42 Various types of farm names altogether
5,0006,000 can be dated to the Viking Age and partly also to the
preceding centuries of the Iron Age, and bear witness to a fairly
intense colonization in that period, indicating that settlements
often spread to the outskirts of older settlements and to more marginal 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 settlement
expansion seems to have been particularly extensive in the western
and south-western parts of Norway, as witnessed by the suffixes of
land, tveit, set and seter.
In the following Middle Ages the reserves of cultivable land in
the forest and other wasteland of stlandet made more extensive
settlement expansion possible than in other parts of the country.
The general movement was away from old settlement cores to more
peripheral and marginal land into forests and up the valleys and
hillsides. Consequently, a royal ordinance by 1273 declared
stlandet to be more densely populated than other parts of the
country.43 In some areas of the region the number of farms may
have been doubled or even tripled from around 800 to the end of
the high Middle Ages. Generally, the new medieval farms and settlements were small and peripheral, as witnessed by about 10,000
medieval farm names. Of these the most widespread type are at
least 3,0004,000 compounds ending in -rud/-rd, meaning clearing. They are most frequently found on the outskirts of older settlements in the Oslofjord region and the best agricultural inland
areas.44 Altogether, the new medieval farm names of stlandet indicate that settlements spread to large areas of forest and valley and
that it became denser because of the establishment of new and
smaller holdings in between the older farms.
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The settlement expansion in Trndelag was more restricted

than in stlandet; only about 27 per cent of the farms existing at
the end of the high Middle Ages seem to have been established
later than the outset of the Viking Age.45 Some areas saw a piecemeal and cumulative colonization by successive generations of
farmers whereas other areas were characterized more by flux than
stability. In the inland and mountains valleys half or more of the
farms existing around 1300 could be clearings of later date than
AD 800, about the same proportion as in parts of stlandet. Some
valleys even saw sedentary settlement and cultivation for the first
time.46
In Vestlandet, including the southernmost region of Agder, and
northern Norway the more restricted reserves of cultivable land
hindered medieval settlement expansion from becoming as extensive as in stlandet and Trndelag. Instead, the growth of population found an alternative outlet in a higher degree of subdivision of
older farms than in other parts of the country.47 This was a process
that would result both in multiple farms consisting of two or more
holdings and in new and separately named farms.
Pollen analyses suggest that many of the newly settled areas, not
least in western Norway, had been cleared of forest at an early stage
(cf. Myhre this volume) and that little woodland survived. Such
areas must then have been used for grazing, foraging and even cultivation long before they became separate farms or holdings.
Nevertheless, they contained reserves of land that might allow settlement expansion. On the other hand, the clearing of woodland
and other wasteland for cultivation would increase the pressure on
the remaining wasteland. New settlers would thus rarely be able to
clear land that was empty in the sense that it was not already used.
Consequently, commons and other wasteland became areas of conflict where borderlines had to be more clearly defined. Both larger
landowners and peasants were parts of such conflicts and the frictions between different interests appear to have been a driving
force in establishing clearer boundaries between farms and settlements. Many of the new farm names of the period reflect these
processes.
How did the expansion and subdivision of settlement affect the
settlement pattern? In southern Scandinavia as in England lordship
contributed to nucleation in the sense that dispersed settlements
were transformed and concentrated into larger, village-type units.
In England this was a process that started in the eighth and ninth
centuries. At the same time an opposite trend in the form of splitting up into separate farms can be observed.48 What was the situation in these respects in Norway?
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Dispersed settlement or agglomeration?

The main unit of production and settlement in Norwegian agrarian
studies has been the so-called named farm (navnegrd), that is a
farm denoted by its own name regardless of its structure, size and
degree of subdivision into holdings.49 Neither Old Norse nor
modern Norwegian makes use of terms corresponding to village
and hamlet when describing native settlements. In the neighbouring Scandinavian countries the concept of village has been put to
use but there is no linguistic distinction between village and hamlet. In Norway, then, the farm concept covers a whole range of different rural settlement structures from small separate holdings
inhabited and run by one family or household to large subdivided
agricultural units, partly clustered together so that they resemble
hamlets and even modest villages.
An all-embracing concept of a farm as a complete resource territory the territory within the farms boundaries (Old Norse:
innan stafs) only existed in the form of the farms name. The separate elements or structures of the farm territory were, however,
denoted by their own terms. The common noun for the inhabited
and cultivated area was Old Norse br, br,50 derived from ba
(dwell, reside etymologically identical with Swedish by village),
or the synonyms bl and blstar. The nucleus of the settlement was
called bli or tn (cf. English town), as in Old English referring to
the residential area and the space between the farmhouses the farmyard. A central farm was called hofubl (main farm), indicating
smaller and probably subordinate farms nearby. The farm territory
was termed jor
or land, including both infield and outfield. Old
c
Norse: garr (etymologically identical with English yard) originally denoted the fenced-in settled and arable land. Its secondary,
extended meaning of farm as a settled and economic agrarian unit
does not seem to have originated before the thirteenth century, and
then most frequently used in stlandet and Trndelag.51
Originally, Norse people also lacked a special term for holding
(bruk) as a unit of production run by one household, normally a
family.52 This may have been due to looser and less defined property rights and a higher degree of joint farming practice than
later.
The holdings of a multiple farm with their houses might each be
separate, or they might be concentrated in a common tn, resembling a hamlet or even a small village. The separately placed holdings
and tn of a farm might have their own sub-names with prefixes
indicating their situation in relation to each other upper, middle
and lower, inner and outer, north, east, south, west, and the like
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and could later develop into separate named farms. Holdings in

multiple tn could be referred to by their dwelling house (Old
Norse: stofa or hs) but normally the farm name gives no clear reference to type of settlement.
Subdivided, agglomerated farms with their houses built closely
together in a common tn were mostly to be found in the coastal
areas of western and northern Norway and in the central and eastern Norwegian border areas towards Sweden, including the later
Swedish districts of Jmtland and Bohusln, now belonging to
Sweden.53 In Bohusln it has been estimated that about 40% of the
farms were clustered in hamlets (byar),54 some of them with a structure resembling the west Norwegian agglomerated farm.
Sometimes the sources show glimpses of such nucleated farms.
In 1314, Kvle, one of the largest farms in the west Norwegian community of Sogndal, was divided between three heirs. Here 2030
houses were clustered together in the same tn: several dwelling
houses, and outhouses, a church and several houses belonging to
the priest.55 At this time Kvle was the residence of local nobles and
probably farmed by hired labour. In the late Middle Ages and in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as many as 67 tenants with
their households worked the farm. The structure of the farm of
Kvle was not unique, it resembles agglomerated settlements known
from later sources. Like Kvle some of these were core areas and cultural foci with seats of magnates and churches. Their centrality was
probably originally due to factors such as high quality land and
convergence of lines of communication. Once established they had
great durability.
A settlement pattern of separate, dispersed farms has been
regarded as typical for most of Norway, and stlandet and
Trndelag in particular. Neither of these regions was, however,
homogeneous in farm structure. Some of the largest farms were
subdivided into three or four holdings in the high Middle Ages and
might constitute quite large units. To what degree such holdings
were clustered together or separated from each other is unclear, but
some examples of common tn are known from stlandet and
Trndelag as well. Nevertheless, the great majority of farms in these
parts of the country were comparatively small and separate, being
worked by only one household, and this was also a widespread settlement pattern in other parts of Norway.56
The pattern of separate, dispersed farms may have originated in
various ways. Land clearing by individual peasant colonists would
naturally result in such a pattern. It would be furthered by the
restricted and fragmented patches of cultivable land left in many
areas in the high Middle Ages. The pioneering spirit of individual
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colonists was stimulated by a deliberate royal policy of rewards in

the form of tax relief and of partial ownership to and reduced land
rent from farms cleared in commons.57 A dispersed settlement pattern could also be the result of grants of land on the edge of existing
settlements to free tenants, a process that can be documented in
many parts of the country. Partible inheritance and weak lordship
may also have contributed to the pattern of separate farms and holdings. In general, this was a pattern that can be said to be connected to the clearing of new land and the establishment of new settlements. Subdivision leading to agglomeration was mainly a phenomenon 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 by
factors such as available resources and soil conditions, ownership
and tenure, and social practices. It is not clear how Norwegian
medieval farms developed in size, apart from the fact that the average size of holdings must have been reduced throughout the period under consideration. The presence of landlords who supervised
the process of land allocation may explain that holdings were established around a common centre in the early part of the period. In
northern Norway clustered settlements in form of small fishing villages (vr, Old Norse: ver) and so-called farm mounds accumulated masses and deposits of household refuse, ruins of buildings etc.
0.55 m high covering areas of 50200 x 50100 m emerged from
the later part of the period.58 This was connected with the development of commercial fisheries. However, their agrarian aspect was
mainly limited to animal husbandry.
To sum it up, the rural settlement pattern of Viking Age and
medieval Norway was not homogeneous, which should serve as a
warning against any monocausal explanation and rather draw attention to a number of possible causal factors in a wide economic and
social context: fragmentation of property rights and partible of inheritance, gifts, sales, mortgages, land grants, and the like. Manorial
tenure and social stratification may have been more important than
has been asserted in previous research. More research is undoubtedly needed to clarify and explain the development of Norwegian settlement in the period. Here, attention should not least be drawn to the
fact that the all-embracing term of farm will include a wider range of
settlement types than traditionally assumed, varying between the different regions of the country as well as within these regions.
In a Scandinavian perspective there is undoubtedly some truth in
the difference that has sometimes been emphasized between the predominance of separate, dispersed farms and holdings in the west
Nordic region consisting of Norway, Iceland and peripheral Swedish
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districts and, on the other hand, the east Nordic village or hamlet districts of most of Denmark, central Sweden and parts of Finland. The
dividing line between the two main types of settlement is far from
clear-cut, neither geographically nor factually. Terminologically we
have seen that the term of by/b covers both the Swedish hamlet and
the medieval Norwegian farm, and the latter might comprise as
many agglomerated holdings as Swedish or Danish hamlets and even
villages.59 In recent archaeological and partly also historical research
in Scandinavia the difference between hamlets and villages has been
blurred by the minimum definition of a village as a cluster of only
three farms or holdings.60 The agglomerated Norwegian farms were,
however, generally smaller and more irregular and had more limited
arable land than Danish medieval villages.
Farming of subdivided farms

We have seen that the subdivision of a farm into separately owned
shares did not automatically imply that it would be correspondingly
split up into separately farmed parts; it could be preserved as a single production unit farmed by a holder who paid land rent to the shareowners. Nor did subdivision into parts farmed by different holders
necessarily 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 farmed as a single unit and only dividing the produce, not the land.61
In the case of shareholdings the various shares of the infield could
be periodically reallocated so that holdings did not remain fixed for
any length of time, be it as separate units or subdivisions of fields. This
could happen annually or at least when a new shareholder took
over62and might result in re-planning of fields and new subdivisions.
The outfield and waste were measured and calculated in more general terms according to rights. Consequently, holdings could be constituted by bundles of specific strips and parcels of the infield and shares in the common resources of the farm or settlement. Ownership
and rights of use of holdings of this type would be expressed as a proportion of the whole farm with no more exact specification given.
Population size and growth

The cumulative result of colonization in the Viking period and Middle
Ages was a landscape of relatively densely settled areas along the coast
and in inland parts of stlandet and Trndelag. Here the valleys were
dotted with farms and holdings, and more dispersed agricultural sett99
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lements were found in more peripheral and marginal parts of the

country. When medieval rural settlement reached its height in the first
part of the fourteenth century an extent that was not reached again
until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the total number of
named farms in the country has been estimated at about 38,000 and
the number of holdings at about 64,00085,000. The highest number
would imply that there were 2025 per cent more holdings at the high
medieval maximum than around 1665 (cf. Lunden, this volume). It
should, however, be emphasized that it is impossible to measure the
extent to which farms were divided into holdings more precisely.
Neither is it possible to calculate the size of the population with
any degree of accuracy before around 1665. Estimates of the total
population size at the high medieval maximum suffer not only from
insufficient evidence of the total number of holdings but also from
lack of knowledge about the average number of people living on
each holding. Around 1665 the number of people per holding averaged about six,63 which given the above-mentioned numbers of
holdings would mean a population ranging between about
400,000 and 530,000 at the end of the high Middle Ages. Against
this it has been argued that the mean household size was now hardly higher than 4.5 people64 and the total population correspondingly lower. There is, however, no reliable contemporary evidence of
factors such as fertility, mortality and mobility, family and household structures. Consequently, demographical evidence of family
and household sizes will remain uncertain.
Around 800, at the beginning of the period under consideration, the number of named farms is less known than in the high
medieval maximum and population estimates based on the extent
of settlement will consequently be even more uncertain. However,
farm-names do indicate that the number of farms at the beginning
of the Viking Age may not have been more than one fourth of what
it was in the first half of the fourteenth century. Generally larger
farm territories may then have supported larger households than at
the end of the high Middle Ages when the number of smallholdings
must have been considerable. Altogether, it is conceivable that the
total population was at least doubled and perhaps even trebled from
about 800 to about 1350.
The decline of the fourteenth century

Traditionally, the outbreak of the Black Death and the following
epidemics have been seen as the decisive factor behind the largescale contraction in settlement, population fall and the decrease of
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agrarian production in late medieval Norway. The results of the

large Nordic research programme on desertion of the land and land
colonization ca. 13001600 (19691976) also supported this view.65
Nevertheless, a process of stagnation and even decline may have
started already before the outbreak of the Black Death. Some
examples of abandoned land are recorded by 1330, at about the
same time as cases of reduced land rent can be documented in
various parts of the country.66 In the course of the thirteenth and
the first half of the fourteenth centuries large-scale hunting and
other time-consuming and labour-intensive activities in outfields
and wasteland stagnated and even ceased in some areas. Thus, the
extensive production of iron, tar and charcoal in inland areas of
stlandet decreased or ended more than 50 years before the Black
Death, in some areas even earlier.67 Legal regulations with a view to
securing the supply of agricultural wage labourers and stimulate
the farming of abandoned land are known already from the midthirteenth century.68 These may all be indications of a lack of agricultural labour that was due to demographic stagnation and even
the start of decline.
Climate curve for Trndelag
700
800
900
1000
1100
1200
1300
1400
1500
1600
Climate curve from ca. AD 700 to 1600 based on dendrochronological analyses of timber from
Trndelag. The curve is uncertain for the oldest period and for the time around 1300, but indicates colder summers from the late thirteenth century.
(Adapted from Thun/Haugan, 1998)
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The latter half of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries may thus constitute a transitional period between a
long era of expansion, starting already before the Viking Age, and
the late medieval era of large-scale population decline, settlement
contraction and abandonment of land. It should, however, be
emphasized that the evidence for such a transitional stage is meagre
and not unambiguous. For instance, colonization was still taking
place in inland parts of stlandet as late as the 1320s.
The case for a transitional period has been supported by references to a parallel trend in other North European countries in the
same period.69 Two explanatory factors that were early put forward
here have also been prominent in the Norwegian discussion: the
change to a colder and more humid climate and the possible
exhaustion of the fertility of arable land.70
The result of such processes would be reduced agricultural productivity, which would again have demographic consequences, particularly in marginal agricultural areas as those of Norway.
However, such effects have proved hard to substantiate due to lack
of direct evidence, and today in Norway, as elsewhere in northern
Europe, there is rather a tendency to seek explanations of stagnation and decline ca. 12501350 in the interplay between demographic and various socio-economic developments. Finally, the problem
boils down to the question of the fundamental balance between
population and resources, which will be finally discussed at the end
of this section, after a closer look at the Viking Age and medieval
Norwegian peasant society as well as the native methods of farming
in the same period.
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Rural society
The rural communities of Viking Age and medieval Norway were
stratified and power was vested in a small group of people.
Nevertheless, the distinctions between higher and lower ranks were
probably smaller and society was more egalitarian than in many
other parts of western and northern Europe.
In the provincial laws people were graded according to social and
economic status and three distinct groups can be discerned: on the
top; the land-owning aristocracy a narrow circle of royalty, high
clergy and magnates mostly in the kings service. Under them; free
farmers (Old Norse: bndr, sing. bndi), in the wide sense of the
term, and at the bottom the totally alienated slaves (flrlar). The
group of farmers was heterogeneous, comprising both freeholders
and tenants. The latter would also include freed slaves (leysingjar)
on their way to becoming fully free peasant status. Freed slaves probably also contributed to shaping a group of cottagers (kotkarlar)
that must have relied on agricultural wage labour or forms of nonagricultural employment to make a living. There was also a completely land-less element of labourers and poor people. The summer
season 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 inequalities
within the farming group were reduced, as attested not least by differences between the provincial laws and the Landlaw of 1274.
Slavery disappeared and the peasants generally became a more
homogenous group of modest and smallholding farmers. We have
already seen that land tenure underwent changes that made relations between tenant farmers and landowners more impersonal and
uniform. Landowners no longer controlled dependent households
and persons but exercised purely economic rights over land, mainly in the form of land rent and in the case of Crown and Church
also through taxation. Consequently the farming families and households enjoyed greater freedom from social restrictions.
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The basic group in the farming society was the family or household, on which taxes were levied. The household (Old Norse: hjn,
equivalent to European medieval terms such as manse, huba, hide)
comprised the family and its employees, and could vary greatly in
size. The smallest unit was run by an einvirki (lone farmer), a male
adult whose household did not consist of more than wife and
under-aged children and possibly also female servants. Ordinary
farmers households would additionally consist of one or more
male adults beside the farmer himself be it sons, other kinsmen,
servants or slaves in addition to female members and minor children, 71 and could be quite numerous on larger farms. Land-owning
magnates 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 more
than thirty slaves in the early eleventh century.72 Extended families
of three generations also occurred, but may have been rare because
of the low life expectancy. Altogether, the size of households varied
greatly both in space and time. Generally, they appear to have been
larger in the earlier than in the later part of the period, due to the
increasing number of subdivided farms and smallholdings towards
the end of the high Middle Ages.
Slavery and its disappearance

Slavery seems to have constituted a normal part of Norwegian farming in the Viking period and early Middle Ages, as was the case in
the rest of western and northern Europe at the same time. Both slavery and its disappearance are attested by law-codes as well as narrative sources. More than hundred paragraphs of the provincial
laws refer to slavery, indicating its importance.73 They discern between native and foreign slaves, with a preference for the former. The
Gulathing Law generally reflects an older phase than the
Frostathing Law, but both of them emphasize the process of freeing
slaves in a way that would seem to indicate that slavery was on the
wane in the twelfth century. By the mid-thirteenth century it appears to have vanished completely, so that the Landlaw of 1274 does
not even mention freed slaves as part of the social structure. Slavery
thus disappeared earlier in Norway than in Denmark and particularly Sweden, but later than for instance in England.74
Legally, the slaves had status of objects rather than persons at
their lords disposal. They could be given important household
functions but generally had to perform heavy and less prestigious
agricultural 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 twelfth
century.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 Norway
at any one time. Estimates vary from 50,00075,000 at the end of
the Viking Age to one fourth of the population at the highest,76 but
this is little more than educated guesswork. Generally, slaves in their
Viking Age heyday seem to have been normal parts of farming households; even tenants of modest means and freed slaves could keep
their own slaves,77 as known from other west European countries as
well. Larger farms could have a dozen or more, if we are to believe
the sagas. Natural procreation, warfare and trade replenished the
servile population. Import of slaves is known about from around
900, but is probably an older phenomenon; it seems to have come
to a halt in the twelfth century.78
Slaves belonged outright to a master from birth to death and
children brought into the world by a female slave were defined as slaves regardless of their fathers status. A freeman could, however, convey free status to his child by a slave woman and even acknowledge
it as his heir. Slave marriages were recognized by law, probably not
least because they were important for the internal recruitment of slaves.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 some
time, varying between the Gulathing and Frostathing Laws, owe
their masters and their successors certain obligations and services
and thus legally constituted an intermediate dependent group between slaves and freemen. There were probably several circumstances
that contributed to the decrease and ultimate disappearance of
Norwegian slavery in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but the
main reason may simply have been economic expediency. As the
population increased and labour became more easily available landowners seem to have preferred to rent their land to land-hungry
tenants rather than cultivating it on their own account by help of
forced labour. Slaves could be given plots of land to clear and farm,
thus procuring the means for buying their freedom. As freed and
tenanted slaves they would for some time be under their masters
control and secure them a solid and permanent income in the form
of land rent and other dues 80 The settling of slaves and freed slaves
on tenanted land is a process that seems to be reflected in the settlement pattern of smallholdings and subordinated holdings on the
fringes of larger farms and in the often derogatory names given to
such holdings.
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To the degree that extra labour was still needed for large-scale
farming of residential and other main farms and for the working of
ordinary farms and holdings it appears that servants and hired seasonal labourers took over the earlier tasks of slaves. The supply of
such labour would increase as the population grew and the cost of
hiring it may have decreased to a level that made it economically
viable compared to the use of probably less effective slave labour.
Moreover, the keeping of slaves involved various responsibilities for
the masters that were avoided by using free and hired labour. This
would seem to explain why hired agricultural labourers (Old Norse:
leigumenn, verkmenn, vinnumenn) figure more prominently in the
sources from the thirteenth century. Such labour and household
servants were probably to a large extent recruited from the group of
freed slaves as long as it existed. As for the apparent shortage of seasonal agricultural labourers from the mid-thirteenth century, it may
be due not only to demographic stagnation but also to the total disappearance of slavery and dependent freed slaves.
The conditions of tenants and freeholders

The tenancy system of the twelfth century, as regulated by the provincial laws, implies that tenants were now normally free peasants
who rented their land according to individual and mutually binding
agreements with the landowners. As free farmers they had the right
and duty to carry arms and attend the public courts (Old Norse:
fling) that also functioned as meeting places and fora of negotiations between peasants and representatives of Crown and Church.
Even though the provincial laws imply that freed slaves and their
still dependent successors could also hold land in tenancy, they probably did not constitute more than a moderate minority of the
twelfth-century Norwegian tenants and appear to have vanished
completely by the mid-thirteenth century.
Within the general legal framework established by the provincial laws, the tenants had the right to use the land they rented on condition that they fulfilled two main obligations towards the landowner: the payment of land rent (Old Norse: landskyld) and the duty
of maintaining the holding they rented and on which they lived
(Old Norse: bu). The duration of leases could obviously vary
considerably. The Gulathing Law mentions annual contracts while
the Frostathing Law and the Landlaw limit the leases contracted by
landowners agents on their own to three years.81 However, there is
nothing in the medieval law-codes that prevented longer leases
from being stipulated in the obligatory individual agreement be106
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tween landowner and tenant, and the Frostathing Law and the
Landlaw imply that such leases were negotiated.
From the two last decades of the thirteenth century there are
records that document both time-based and life-long leases, some
of the latter even with the right of heirs to continue to hold the land.
Life-long leases seem to have been practised particularly by central
ecclesiastical institutions such as episcopal sees and monasteries
and probably also by the Crown in the latter case at least as a
means of stimulating clearings in the commons to which the Crown
claimed ownership.82 In 1289 the first Norwegian tenant mentioned
in a record, Arne Gasse, was thus given life-long tenure of a small
Crown holding in the common of the community of Ski near Oslo
and the promise of private ownership of half the land he would
additionally clear.83
Even though there is far from sufficient evidence for calculating,
over time, the occurrence of life-long in proportion to time-based
leases it may be that the former were a product of the assumed
demographic stagnation from the latter half of the thirteenth century. This made it harder for large landowners to find good tenants.
But it should also be taken into consideration that it was in the interest of both the Crown and central ecclesiastical institutions to have
stable tenants that could be trusted to pay their dues regularly.
As a consequence of demographic pressure and land clearing a
rapidly expanding periphery of tenanted holdings emerged in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, carved out of outfields, forest and
other wasteland, often common land. As tenant farming became
the normal way of working the estates of the Crown, the Church
and magnates making inroads in freehold land through the inheritance and marriage system and voluntary or forced transfers to the
Church and Crown. Tenants would as we have seen come to
constitute the great majority of Norwegian farmers at the end of
the high Middle Ages.
Current estimates indicate that the mean level of land rents was
at that time about one-sixth of the average gross output of a holding. Rent was paid in kind from the output, most commonly in
grain and butter but also in fish, timber, skins, hides and the like,
indicating the importance of outfields and wasteland. The amount
of land rent was settled by contract and was probably to a large
extent determined by tradition. By the time of the Landlaw, tenant
farming had become so omnipresent that Crown taxation was fixed
according to the size of land rent, meaning that all holdings, including those worked by their owners, were to be assessed according to
their value as rented objects.84 It is this universal and long-lasting
system of land assessment recorded in land registers, tax lists and
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other documents that makes it possible to estimate the distribution of landed property and various other quantitative calculations of
agricultural conditions and developments in high and late medieval
Norway.
In the course of high Middle Ages all farmers, freeholders as
well as tenants, were subjected to taxation by the Crown and
Church. Payment of tithes to the Church was introduced in
Norway in the first part of the twelfth century and made legally
binding over most of the country in the 1160s, several hundred
years later than in England but only a little later than in Denmark
and somewhat earlier than in Sweden.85 In the latter phase of the
century of civil wars from the 1130s, the economic contributions of
the peasantry to the naval levy (Old Norse: leiangr) was gradually
converted into more regular taxation and in 1274 the Landlaw prescribed the payment of annual leiangr during peace time, fixed at
half the provisions due in the case of mobilization. When such dues
were added to the land rent a tenant and his family may have had
to pay altogether about thirty per cent of their gross produce to the
Crown, Church and landowners.86 This is about the same level as in
other north European countries, but then labour services on the
landowners demesne were not claimed and other forms of personal dependency did not exist.
Freeholders owning their own land did not have to pay land rent
and enjoyed a higher legal status than tenants as they had free disposal of their land and their kin enjoyed the right to inherit it.
Freeholders with al right (Old Norse: hauldar, sing. hauldr) constituted a farming elite with a higher legal right broadly speaking
the sum of individual rights, above all to compensation for various
violations or infringements than tenants and freeholders without
al right. However, the hauldar were probably not a numerous
group in relation to the great majority of tenants and other freeholders at the end of the high Middle Ages. Moreover, the distinction
between freeholders and tenants had by now become blurred by the
widespread practice of part tenure, meaning that many peasants
would farm part of their holdings as owners and pay land rent to
other owners for the rest. As most of the best agricultural land was
now in the hand of larger landowners, part of their tenants may also
have been relatively well off compared to many freeholders.
In the course of the high Middle Ages Norwegian rural society
became more homogeneous than it had been in the Viking period
and early Middle Ages through the disappearance of slavery, the
drift towards modest holdings and smallholdings, the growth of
tenancy 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 medieval

Norwegian farming society was generally freer and more egalitarian
than that of other contemporary European societies with a more
feudal and hierarchical structure. However, it should be emphasized
that to all appearances the rural communities of Norway had previously been more hierarchical and more strongly socially stratified
than 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 earlier
research. Private landowners could have a fixed abode but could
also possess several residences which they moved between.
Demographic pressure and ownership patterns may have stimulated the mobility of tenants. The short-term land leases mentioned
in the law-codes were probably often renewed but can also mean
that farmers and their households were often more than once in
their lifetime on the move with their chattels, domestic animals and
other movable goods. This is supported by the law-codes detailed
regulations in the process of moving, which stressed both the
tenants rights and restrictions imposed on them in such cases.
A system of reallocation linked to joint tenures also seems to be
connected with short-term leases. Such systems are also known
from other parts of northern Europe, such as Ireland and Scotland,
in the same period,87 and meant that the relationship between the
tenants and the land they cultivated was being continuously broken
and re-forged.
Generally, short-term leases and mobility should probably be
seen as being connected to with demographic pressure and an
ample supply of cheap manpower.88 As indicated above, there may
have been a trend towards longer time-based and life-long leases as
a consequence of demographic stagnation from the latter half of the
thirteenth century.
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Farms and farming practices

A farm was not only a domicile with land and domestic animals
that secured the subsistence of people living there. On a symbolic
level it represented fertility, myth, ancestral tradition, history and
power. These were all factors that influenced farming practices and
the way farms were structured. However, it is the economic and
functional aspects that have so far dominated research into farms
and farming.
Farm houses
The tn with its dwelling houses and outhouses formed the core of
the farm. Its layout varied in time and space, in accordance with the
settlement pattern, the composition of the households and their
social and economic position. The tradition of building so-called
longhouses, which were long and narrow buildings with rooms for
various functions, continued into the Viking period and Middle
Ages. In such houses rooms for dwelling, working and storage and
byres for the livestock were placed under one roof. From the eleventh century, and in some places even earlier, the multifunctional
longhouses were increasingly replaced by smaller and more differentiated farm-buildings, containing one or two rooms for special
functions: dwelling houses, cookhouses, saunas, stables, cowsheds,
sheepsheds, goathouses, pigsties, barns, mill houses, smithies etc.
The dwelling houses were generally smaller and more varied in size
and plan than earlier. While longhouses could shelter several households the shorter medieval dwelling houses were probably not
built for more than one household.
Altogether, the differentiation and specialization of farm buildings was probably connected with the trend towards smaller households, and offered functional advantages. By separating the different breeds of animals the amount of fodder could be reduced, as
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larger animals produce more heat and humidity than smaller breeds and could endure lower temperatures without additional fodder.89 Storage functions were improved when accommodated by
their own buildings or separate rooms in larger storage buildings.
Moving the animals out of the longhouses could also represent a
new lifestyle with greater distance to the animals.
Building techniques were also improved, not least by raising the
wooden buildings on timber frames that rested onto stone foundations so that they would last longer. This was done in other parts of
Scandinavia as well.90 People also began to build two-storied lofts,
generally with a room for food storage on the ground floor and a
sleeping or living room on top where clothes and other textiles
could be stored. Two-storied houses were also built for storage
functions only and may have been influenced by the new urban
architecture. Some of them have still survived with timber that can
be 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 method
appears to have been predominant in Vestlandet in the Viking period and early Middle Ages, whereas log houses with timbers notched
together in the corners appear in eastern Norway from the ninth
century, and in the early Middle Ages became predominant both in
this region and in Trndelag. Log construction seems to have spread to Vestlandet in the high Middle Ages, as attested by the urban
excavations in Bergen and in Borgund in Sunnmre, but this did
not supplant the traditional post and beam constructions, which
have been used continually up to the present time.
Building in stone did not seriously start in Norway until the late
eleventh century and was largely reserved for monumental and prestigious buildings commissioned by the Crown and Church and in
a few cases by private magnates. Outside the towns such buildings
mostly appeared in the form of churches and monastic buildings
and in a few cases as bottom stories in prestigious two-storied farm
buildings with timbered living quarters on top.
Farm structures and land use

Medieval Norway saw a wide range of farm types, from farms of
one household that was completely independent of its neighbours
at one extreme, to the agglomerated farms set in fairly extensive
open fields, where cultivation was subject to communal organization, at the other. There were mainly pastoral farms in the inner valleys and uplands of stlandet and in large parts of northern and
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western Norway, where cultivable land was limited and surrounded

by extensive wasteland, and the more balanced mixed farms in the
lowlands of Trndelag, stlandet, Jren and smaller areas in the
rest of the country, where more land was cultivable and waste generally accounted for a far smaller part of the landed resources. In
spite of geographical variety and regional types there were nevertheless similarities between farms all over the country with regard
to structure, function, nomenclature and chronology.
Essentially, Viking age and medieval farms consisted of two
complementary components that reflected a mixed and integrated
cattle and arable economy: on the one hand the farmland proper
within the fence (innan gars), consisting of plots of arable land,
meadows and enclosed pastures; and on the other, the outlying por-
The medieval types of fences have been used until the present. The materials and building techniques varied according to function. Fences of brushwood (above left) were simpler constructions than the wooden fences of diagonal
design (above right). Fences of piles (below) existed in different variations. Stone fences were the most solid ones.
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tion of the farm outfields and waste outside the fence (utan
gars). The common wasteland further away was added to these two
main parts of the farm proper.
The infield was the fertile and more intensively farmed nucleus
of the farm but demographic pressure could also lead to the cultivation of outfields where and when it was possible, and the clearing of
new holdings would alter the demarcation lines between infield and
outfield. While the farmers of multiple farms would have exclusive
rights over parts of the common infield for at least part of the year,
they normally had to satisfy themselves with common rights of
exploitation in the outfields and wasteland within the outer boundaries (innan stafs) of the farms which contained pastures and
forest. Further away the commons were in Old Norse denoted by the
term almenningr, that is an area open for all men. In practice, however, single farms and larger settlements would often have established
exclusive customary rights of exploitation in commons, as expressed
by the legal phrase that every man has the right to his allmenningr.
The fence that surrounded the infield (Old Norse: garr, cf. Scottish
garth) signified a spatial differentiation of the farm that was generally
determined by the cultivable land. It was usually built in stone or various wooden constructions but could also be a hedge or dike.
Rock, large stones, water and other natural barriers would serve as
boundaries when possible. On tenanted farms the boundary between
infield and outfield was also a dividing line between land over which
the tenants had full rights of use and wasteland where the landowners
only allowed the tenants exploitation for their own use, not for profit.
Functionally, the boundary of the infield was a line across which
livestock was moved seasonally. Animals were put out to graze in
the waste in the spring and came back to feed on the aftermath and
stubble after hay and grain crops had been harvested. The primary
function of fences was to keep livestock from entering and damaging the growing crops during summer, or to enclose common pastures in outfields and waste, which might be the first step towards
cultivation of such pieces of land. Symbolically, fencing expressed a
scheme for ordering the universe, by which different parts of the
land served as dwelling places for the deities, human beings, giants
and other forces of chaos of Norse mythology.
Fields and field systems

We have already seen that farms could be subdivided in different
ways that would have consequences for the layout and farming of
fields. Subdivision of property right did not automatically lead to
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the physical splitting up of the cultivable land; the farm could be

kept as a production unit worked by a farmer who paid land rent to
the various shareowners to which he himself could belong or not.
But the farmland could also be divided into separate, consolidated
holdings, each worked by their own farmer freeholder, tenant or
a combination of both.
On agglomerated farms the field systems became more complicated and consequently required a higher degree of communal
organization. In such cases the Gulathing Law of western Norway
and the later national Landlaw refer to two principles of field division: (i) the simpler division into compact parts, and (ii) the more
intricate division into strips of equal length and breadth.92 The latter principle led to a complicated field system that was to prevail in
the hamlet-like clustered farms in the west and north until the nineteenth century. The subdivision of the fields could vary from carefully arranged strips to plots without systematic arrangement. Each
farmer would then dispose of a large number of scattered and intermingling strips and plots, but strips and plots of one group of holdings 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 and
equally.94 As elsewhere, distribution in Norway could be carried out
by lottery, and we have already seen that reallocations could take
place over time. The Gulathing Law stated that tenants could claim
redistribution of fields when they leased or released a holding. In
principle this could then happen every year, as was the case in other
north European countries, among them Ireland and Scotland.95
Unfortunately, there is little clear evidence of the degree to
which fields were worked in cooperation by the farmers of agglomerated farms. In northern Norway it appears that both fields and
meadows could be farmed in common as a single unit. Ploughing,
sowing and reaping could be done jointly and the crops shared in
the end.96 This was, however, hardly a common system. When strips
and plots were distributed among the farmers, as they more often
were, each of them would have the right to the produce of his own
shares. It would nevertheless be practical to work the open fields
together in ways that are known from later, but to what extent this
was 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 economic
cooperation and common obligations of the farmers. Although the
clustered farms of Norway were hardly dependent on common cultivation and subject to fixed rules of working the soil to the same
degree as hamlets and villages in the neighbouring countries, traces
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of collective forms of farming can nevertheless be found. They

include rules about permanent enclosures and the time for sending
the cattle to pastures, which according to the Landlaw should be
agreed by the farmers at a special meeting.97 There are even traces
that resemble the organization of hamlets and villages in other parts
of Scandinavia, with appointed farm bailiffs and farm courts, 98 the
age and extent of which are, somewhat unclear, however.
When it is also taken into consideration that the extent of fixed
field systems and joint cultivation in the hamlets and villages of the
neighbouring countries may have been exaggerated, there is much
to be said for reducing the traditional distinction between such settlements 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 and
stockbreeding varied geographically. Grain-growing was most
important on the more extensive cultivable soils of stlandet,
Trndelag and Jren and in smaller areas of favourable conditions
elsewhere, whereas pastoral farming generally played a greater role
in western and northern Norway. Consequently, there were marked
regional differences with regard to the important relation between
cultivation and fallowing. In large parts of Trndelag and stlandet
the supply of animal manure was limited in relation to the arable
land, which made regular fallowing necessary in order to preserve
the fertility of the soils. In areas where the scale of cultivation was
more limited in relation to the keeping of livestock, continuous
cropping without fallow periods was made possible by the ample
supply of manure for fields that because of their limited extent
could also be worked more intensively.
Manure was not the only fertiliser. Fields could also be fertilised
with turf from outlying areas, humus supplied from nearby woods
or by beat burning, seaweed, algae and fish offal. In western
Norway, archaeology has disclosed that long-term transformation
of soils by the supply of turf and humus started in the early Iron Age
and was intensified in the Viking period and Middle Ages.99 This
was also a common practice in other areas of Scandinavia and
around the North Sea at this time.100
Rotational farming in Norway can be traced back at least to the
twelfth century, as mentioned in the Frostathing law of Trndelag.
Here the tenants were obliged to keep a minimum number of animals 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 be

left fallow and fenced in for the animals to graze and trample it so
that it would be naturally manured, implying a kind of fold-course system. Manure accumulated during the winter was to be spread
on the fallow soils. These regulations were repeated in the Landlaw
of 1274,102 now probably applied to the grain-growing districts of
stlandet as well.
There is, however, no mention of fallowing and obligatory
manuring in the Gulathing law of Vestlandet, where the supply of
manure and other fertilisers was apparently ample enough to make
continuous cropping a normal method of cultivation. Here too,
domestic animals could be herded together in temporary folds or
pens, where they trod the ground and fertilised it with their droppings.103 In outfields the folding of stock during summer could be
a means of preparing the ground for cultivation the following
spring.
That Norwegian farmers should continue to sow every year or
leave the land fallow only every fourth year meant that the countrys
small proportion of cultivable land was quite intensively exploited
and implies that the productivity of the arable land was relatively
high. However, other fallow systems may also have been practised.104 Thus, outfield plots could apparently only be cultivated
occasionally in combination with continuous cropping of the infield. The Norwegian field systems were altogether flexible, but
generally more irregular and small-scale than the two- and threefield systems of Denmark and the more fertile areas of Sweden
where fields lay fallow in a two- or three-year cycle. Two-field rotation may also have reached parts of stlandet and Trndelag while
continuous cropping on its part continued in more peripheral parts
of Sweden, particularly on moraine soils.
Barley and oats were the predominant crops in Norway; they
were sown over most of the country, separately or together. Crop
rotation appears to have been introduced in the early Middle Ages
with sowing of rye in the autumn, barley and oats in the spring
a practice that was common in Atlantic Europe generally. The first
clear evidence of winter rye in Norway is its mention in the
Gulathing Law in connection with the clearing new land in the
outfields.105 Wheat was also sown to a smaller degree and the mix
of crops was adapted to local needs and conditions. The cultivation of more than one species of grain would reduce the risks of
poor harvests in an uncertain climate. Grain was grown as high as
800 m above sea-level in the inner valleys of stlandet,106 higher
than the present grain border, which demonstrates the importance 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 in
the western and northern parts of the country where the areas of
cultivable land were most limited in relation to the uncultivable
areas of forest, moorland, marshland and mountainous terrain that
constituted most of the land surface in all parts of the country. The
wealth of grazing and other fodder resources of outfields and wasteland gave Norwegian farming a special character and position in
a north European perspective, which it shared with more peripheral parts of Sweden and the north Atlantic islands that were settled
by Norse colonists in the Viking Age. These were resources that
would more than compensate for the small acreage of arable land
on many farms. Subsistence was, however, in such cases dependent
on the opportunities for households to exploit large areas for grazing, hay-making, foraging, forestry, hunting, fishing and other
activities. Considerable manpower was needed for this, and in some
cases also costly equipment and financial strength.
The numbers of species of domestic animals and their proportionate importance from farm to farm cannot be accurately measured, as the source material is fragmentary and considerable geographic and social variations occurred. The oldest written information is Ottars account of his farm in northern Norway around 890,
where he kept 20 cows, 20 sheep, 20 pigs and an unknown number
of horses for ploughing. According to the Gulathing Law a heard of
6 cows was the norm for a smallholding in Vestlandet,107 implying
that most farms had larger stocks. A paragraph in the Frostathing
Law may indicate that a stock of 12 cows was normal on the farms
of Trndelag, about the same size as recorded in this region in the
seventeenth century.108 On the smaller holdings of stlandet a
stock of 4 cows, 2 oxen, 6 sheep and a pig appears to have been quite
normal, while some of the best farms could have up to about 25
cows plus oxen, horses, sheep and pigs. In one of the upland valleys
of stlandet there is even recorded a stock of 60 cows around 1350.
Archaeological and written evidence show that the length of cowsheds could vary from about 78 metres on east Norwegian farms
of normal size to more than 20 metres on smaller west Norwegian
farms, indicating the greater relative importance of cattle farming
in Vestlandet.109
Cattle were by far the most important domestic animals, but a
considerable number of sheep were also kept, particularly along the
coast where the mild winters in the west made it possible for them
to graze all-year-round, and in highland areas where both sheep
and goats could make particularly good use of the mountain pastu117
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res. The importance of pigs is hard to estimate but they appear to

have been a smaller but nevertheless integral part of the livestock.
Oxen were kept as draught animals together with horses, the latter
also with more prestigious riding and transport functions in the
upper strata of rural society. Poultry can also be documented although the amount is unknown.
Whereas grain was increasingly imported to Norwegian towns,
particularly Bergen, and the fishing districts along the western and
northern coast in the high Middle Ages, the produce of animal husbandry was more than sufficient to supply the whole population,
including townspeople, fishermen and clergy, so that there was even
some export of animal products, particularly hides and skins and
some butter.110 The archaeological bone material from medieval
towns would seem to indicate that about 90 per cent of the meat
consumed there derived from cattle. The low slaughter age of oxen
documented by the animal bones from Bergen, mostly less than
four years, implies that they were raised to a large extent as meat
animals beside their function as draught animals.111
Long before the Viking period the grazing resources of more distant, high-lying areas in valleys and mountains were exploited by
the use of seasonally occupied sites (Old Norse sing. and pl. str),
comparable to British shielings. People would move with livestock
to str huts and pastures in the summer season and worked with
dairy production, the collection of winter fodder and berries, hunting, fishing and partly also the production of iron from lakes or
bog ore. The str system made it possible to keep larger stocks than
Present and past sizes of

cattle, horses, sheep and
pigs. Medieval breeds were
small compared to the present ones.
(Adapted from ye, 2002)
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could be supported by the lands of the farms proper. The field evidence for the system112 included place names and from the high
Middle Ages also the written evidence of laws and records.
Toponymy in particular bears witness to the fact that str were
pushed further and further into the upland valleys and mountains
as colonization progressed in the Viking period and following
Middle Ages.
Three different types of str systems existed in Norway, all of
them going back at least to the Middle Ages, and all types could be
used in combination.113 The first type was located within the farm
area itself, normally in the outfields within the farms boundary.
This was common in western and northern Norway. The second
type, common in the upland areas of stlandet and Trndelag,
seems primarily to have been connected with hay-making and the
collection of other types of fodder. The third str type of upland
valleys and mountains, where people and animals stayed throughout the summer months, could consist of two or three interconnected sites at different altitudes, so that the livestock was moved gradually higher as the summer progressed.
The provincial laws, the Landlaw and records yield evidence of
wasteland that might be common in principle but where in fact the
establishment of str was by no means open for every man. In
Vestlandet, the Gulathing law reveals a system by which individual
farms and their holdings had established customary rights to str
sites in the commons whereas grazing was in principle free for all
livestock. In Trndelag and stlandet it appears that the establishment of str sites was to a larger extent a common right of the
farms of adjacent settlements and there is evidence that east
Norwegian farms could share str sites. Generally, one gets the
impression that the common wasteland used for str and other
types of exploitation was far from being a no-mans land by the high
Middle Ages. Farms or groups of farms had established exclusive
customary rights and the areas were subject to a fairly strict system
of use and management.114
A major part of the work in outfields and wasteland, whether
connected with str or not, was the time-consuming labour of gathering winter fodder grass, leaves, moss, heather, twigs, and even
fish offal and different species of seaweed along the coast. Even if
animals, particularly sheep and goats, could graze through the mild
winters of the outer coastal districts of western Norway, the general
situation was that the stock had to be supplied with fodder about
200 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 Ages
would not have been possible without increased food production.
An introductory question mark has already been placed behind the
traditional assumption that Norwegian farming and farming systems of this period were static, fostering the neo-Malthusian scenario of food production that was not able to cope with the demands
of an increasing population.116 There are indications that this notion may be too negative as has already been mentioned. Not only did
a growing population and an increased input of labour lead to the
clearing of reserves of cultivable land and more intensive exploitation both of such land and wasteland. Instances of improved farming methods have also been touched upon. We can now consider
traces of agricultural improvement and innovation together with
their implications for the productivity of farming.
Manual work was all-important throughout the whole period
under consideration, as cultivation, harvesting, collection of fodder
and other exploitation of the wasteland never ceased to demand a
very high input of labour. However, we have seen that the organization of labour changed with the disappearance of slavery, the alternative hiring of free labour and not least the expansion of tenanted
farming. Conceivably, the self interest of tenants and their families
would make them more productive than forced labour, and this
may also have been the case with free servants and wage labourers
compared to slaves. The effect of such social and economic changes cannot be measured but the probability of a positive influence on
agricultural productivity should not be overlooked.
The individuals agricultural production capacity was limited by
what today appears as to be primitive technical equipment. A small
range of tools, many of which were multipurpose, also showed a
remarkable consistence throughout centuries over most of the
country. However, there was one way of making the simple wooden
farming implements more effective, namely to improve their effec120
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tiveness and durability by sheathing the working parts with iron or

making them of iron all through. The growth of iron production in
the period made this increasingly possible with positive effects for
the farming equipment used for cultivation, harvesting and exploitation of the wasteland, such as spades, axes, picks, sickles and scythes. Iron shares and sockets of hoes, ard ploughs, sickles and the like
appear as grave-goods from the seventh century in Norway.117
The light ard plough, which had been used for cross-ploughing
for several millennia, was now strengthened by an iron share but
could still only break up the ground surface and move it without
turning it over. Considerable manual labour had consequently to be
used to supplement the work of the plough animals. In Sweden,
iron-shod spades have been found from the early eleventh century118 and were probably used from about the same time in Norway.
The iron-shod hoe may well have been the common tillage implement in the Viking Age over large parts of the country to judge from
its distribution in pre-Christian graves.119
In north-western Europe, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
represented a boom period for improved farming technology and
methods,120 and this was a development that made itself felt in
Norway as well. Technological novelties, new crops and breeds,
novel methods, physical and tenurial reorganization had already
appeared in the Viking Age and continued to be introduced and
spread in the following Middle Ages up to and including the thirteenth century, especially in the south-eastern and most fertile areas
of the country.
Tillage equipment and methods underwent important changes.
One of them was the introduction and increasing use of the plough
from the Viking Age. It had a ploughshare made wholly of wood
covered with a thin asymmetrical iron-sheath, and presumably also
a fixed mouldboard that would help to turn the ground surface
over. The archaeological evidence for medieval ploughs in Norway
is very scarce, and consists only of iron shares and coulters from the
early part of the period. Norwegian specimens of asymmetrical
plough and symmetrical ard sheaths dating from the Viking period
are generally very light, while medieval specimens known through
written records were much heavier, up to 7 kg.121 The two ploughing tools the traditional light ard and the new mouldboard plough
existed side by side and were used for different purposes and on
different soils. Here the advantage of the plough was that it could
deal with heavier soils than the ard but the two implements could
also complement each other in the working of fields. Traces of
ploughing 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 mouldboard

plough that could best deal with heavier soils, have so far not been
found in Norway.
Tillage efficiency was improved by the introduction and increasing use of horses as draught animals. Horses were faster but also
more expensive than oxen, and were used for ploughing in Norway
already in the Viking Age, as attested by Ottars account of his farm
in northern Norway around 890.123 Horses did not oust oxen as
draught animals; both species were used in the high Middle Ages,
reflecting an ambivalent attitude to their qualities as plough animals,124 but the partial shift to horses seems to have happened earlier in Norway than for instance in Denmark and Sweden,125 and
may be explained by their suitability for small peasant operations.
Although they were individually more expensive than oxen, horses
had the advantage of being not only stronger and faster but also
multifunctional being useful in ploughing, harrowing, hauling,
riding and as pack animals. The development of more effective harnessing and of horseshoes in the early Middle Ages made it possible
to use horses more effectively in agricultural work. The breast harness seems to have replaced the throat harness in the ninth and
tenth centuries126 and light iron horseshoes are documented from
the 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 of
hoeing, and may have been introduced in Norway together with the
mouldboard plough. The medieval harrows were rectangular with
tines of wood, but other forms may well have existed. The earliest
Motif from a tapestry of the
Oseberg burial, showing
harnessing of horses around
the mid-ninth century.
(Adapted from ye
Slvberg, 1976)
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harrow in Norway is mentioned in an Eddic poem that reflects conditions in the Viking Age.128 Dung forks for spreading manure after
sowing are also known as a new tool from the Viking Age129 and may
be connected with the general intensification of arable cultivation,
Drainage technology, which developed along the North Sea in
the Middle Ages, has been regarded as irrelevant for Norwegian
medieval agriculture. Drainage by digging ditches on the edges of
fields for the accretion of water and improvement of the soil can,
however, be documented in eastern Norway in the fourteenth century and may have been more common than previously assumed. 130
It was harvesting that required the greatest amount of manual
labour. Technological improvements that made this a less time-consuming work were therefore of great importance. In the haymaking the short-handled scythe had been used from the Iron Age
and was still in use throughout the Middle Ages. It was, however,
increasingly superseded by the long-handled scythe, probably from
the thirteenth century.
From the same time it appears that forks were introduced and
that a new type of wooden rake was used to turn the hay, gather it
together and stack it.
In the harvesting of grain, the sickle with an iron blade still
dominated as a tool in the Viking Age but with more differentiated
The long-handled scythe developed during the

Middle Ages. Here painted as a calendar motif of
July in Margrete Skuledatters psalter from the first
part of the thirteenth century.
123
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forms than earlier. Their distribution as grave-goods indicates

adaptation to different regional farming landscapes in the western
and eastern parts of the country. By the high Middle Ages the sickle
may have been supplemented by a scythe as a grain-reaping implement.131 The cutting edge of sickles could either be smooth or toothed and the latter form may have been connected with the harvesting 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 with
the increased grain production. The further processing of grain was
facilitated by the construction of water mills and querns. They
appeared in Norway from the late twelfth century at the latest and,
many of them were built by ecclesiastical institutions and aristocratic landowners.133
At the end of the thirteenth century Norwegian agriculture had
largely reached a technical level equivalent to the period that preceded the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Most of the techniques which Europe was familiar with
were known in Norway at the end of the thirteenth century. Many
of the innovations that spread to Scandinavia, and were increasingly being used from the Viking period to the end of the high Middle
Ages, had existed for centuries in southern parts of Europe. They
reached the southern part of Norway at the same time as they were
introduced in the rest of southern Scandinavia, horse ploughing
and suitable harnessing as well as dung forks even slightly earlier.
On the other hand, water mills appear a little later than in Denmark
and several centuries later than in England and Ireland.134
From the eleventh and twelfth centuries a more differentiated
selection of vegetables, fruits and spices, grown in horticultural enclosures, appeared in Norway apples, plums, cabbage, angelica,
turnips, leek, onions and various sorts of legumes (peas, beans and
vetches) as well as hops. Hemp may also be a new crop from this
period. The cultivation of rye expanded during the Middle Ages,
not least because of the introduction of winter rye, involving crop
rotation. New technology and crops also led to changes in field layout and facilitated the cultivation of virgin land. The more systematic use of fallow periods and manure in Trndelag and
stlandet, as indicated by the high medieval law-codes, conceivably
helped to preserve and perhaps even increase soil fertility.
Finally, the building of more differentiated and durable farm
buildings probably had positive effects both on the productivity of
animal husbandry and the storage of crops.
The various innovations and improvements of farming technology and methods should be seen as a whole of interrelated ele124
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Land clearing
Fallow periods
New crops and

crop rotation
Increased
soil fertility
Drainage
Stronger
ploughs
Iron shod
spades
Improved axe?
Harrows
Horse shoes
More effective
harnessing
The medieval agrarian innovations were interconnected. Heavier and more solid equipment made it easier to clear
and cultivate heavy soils. Ploughing expanded because of better harnessing and equipment for horses.
(Adapted from ye, 1999)
ments,135 connected with general trends in societal development. As

the elements were generally interdependent it is difficult to give
individual priority to any of them. For instance, the increased use of
iron to strengthen farming equipment, the use of the mouldboard
plough and the introduction of winter rye and other crops all contributed to the land reclamation that served as an outlet of the
population growth, and led to an increased agricultural production.
However, innovations and improvements could appear in different
regional combinations, adapted to the particular ecotypes and environmental conditions. In areas where arable land was scattered and
patchy, as they were in western Norway, fields were still tilled with hoes
and spades. Such tools were not only necessary for farmers who could
not afford ploughs and draught animals, they could also lead to more
thorough tilling of the soil and larger crops, as was the case in Jren
in the early modern period. In horticulture and the cultivation of textile plants such as hemp and flax the plots were worked with spades.
When assessing the productivity of Norwegian Viking period
and medieval farming one must also take into consideration other
activities than cultivation and animal husbandry, such as fishing
and the exploitation of outfields and wasteland through forestry
and tar production, quarrying of stone for various purposes
(whetstones, mill stones, soapstone vessels etc.) and iron production. Iron production was made more effective by a new type of furnace that was introduced in the late Iron Age and spread rapidly
125
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over wide inland areas in the Viking period and Middle Ages to
about 1300.136 Forestry became more important from the thirteenth century as Norway started to export timber to the British Isles
and the north-western continent.
By far the most important exports from high medieval Norway
were dried fish (stockfish) and to a smaller extent other fish products such as fish oil and herring. This trade started in earnest in
the early twelfth century and expanded rapidly throughout the rest
of the high Middle Ages.137 This would stimulate the further development of a fisher-farmer economy in the northern and western
coastal districts where commercial seasonal fishing made it possible
for the fishermen to buy imported grain and other commodities.
They would then often reduce their arable farming on marginal
soils but go on keeping livestock for the need of their households.
The Crown, ecclesiastical institutions and private landowners
appear to have played an important entrepreneurial role in the process of agricultural innovation and the development of industries
such as iron production, forestry and not least commercial fishing.
Their surplus in kind from land rent, taxation and other incomes
was channelled into foreign trade, which would stimulate the production of the commodities in question. The new towns where the
international commercial centre of Bergen was particularly important, were not only channels of the exports of farming and related
economic activities but also of foreign agricultural impulses, as seen
not least in the development of horticulture.138 The extent to which
the farmers themselves were behind improvement and innovation
is hard to assess but one should not underestimate the capability of
reorientation in the farming population.
Sufficient food production?

Altogether, there is little doubt that agricultural food production in
Norway increased throughout the Viking period and the following
Middle Ages up to about 1300. This was not only the result of a higher input of labour per acre in land clearing, cultivation, collection
of fodder and various wasteland activities. Improvement and innovation in farming technology and methods must also have contributed 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 production may have been higher than it was in the early modern period, as indicated by a tithe-based estimate of west Norwegian grain
outputs around 1340.139 The new leguminous plants possessed a
126
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higher nutritional value than grain and would, to the degree that
they were used, improve the diet. They would also increase the supply of soil nitrogen, but hardly on a scale that changed the role of
manure as the major fertiliser. Like vegetables fruit was probably
rather uncommon in the earliest period but seems to have gained
importance in the high Middle Ages, when fruit-growing can be
documented in districts that have later specialized in this type of
horticulture, particularly the fjord districts of Vestlandet.140 The
exports of the expanding commercial fisheries, and to some extent
of animal husbandry and wasteland industries too, made it possible
to import foreign grain to supplement domestic production in the
fishing districts of northern and western Norway.
There is thus considerable Norwegian evidence to support the
theory of Ester Boserup, referred to in the introduction, that population growth in pre-industrial societies will stimulate agricultural
improvement and innovation and lead to increased food productivity. The neo-Malthusian notion of a population that outgrew its
means 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, farmers
around the year 1300 could not expect to harvest more than about
three times the grain they sowed provided that conditions were
about the same as in the seventeenth century. Even though the output could vary greatly from district to district, with higher yields in
the best grain-growing areas such as Jren, 141 there were thus limits
to how much the cultivable land could produce.
The scarcity of quantifiable evidence makes it impossible to
measure the relation between food supply and population size
throughout the period that has been dealt with in this presentation.
Any assessment of the development of living standards will therefore be tentative and fraught with uncertainty. However, a safe conclusion is that the increase in agricultural food production did not
significantly log behind the growth of population in the early part
of the period. These two processes were closely interdependent.
During the thirteenth and early part of the fourteenth centuries
there are indications that living conditions worsened for many people in rural society. Agricultural settlement reached a geographical
extent that has never been exceeded, and the numerous tenant
families who eked their living out of smallholdings on land of
modest or low quality must have found it hard to support themselves. Cottagers, wage labourers and servants were even worse off.
The indications of population stagnation and even the beginning of
decline that has been outlined above should be ascribed to the
increasing difficulty of making a new living out of farming.
127
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Side 128
This does not mean that an absolute limit had been reached for
how many people a large and still sparcely populated country such
as Norway could support. Even though there are indications of certain crisis phenomena from the mid-thirteenth century, contemporary sources do not convey an impression of general population
pressure and distress. It was probably still possible to make a reasonable living on many of the farms that were abandoned as a consequence of the dramatic loss of population caused by the Black
Death and the following epidemics of plague in the late Middle
Ages.
However, the situation at the end of the high Middle Ages was
not favourable for further agricultural expansion and the difficulties of establishing an economic basis for new farming families may
have led to the demographic stagnation indicated above. Although
the causes probably are complex and hard to deduce directly from
the sources, the inherent mechanisms in rural societies towards self
regulation and the ability to maintain subsistence observed in later
periods may have resulted in a lower marriage rate and also perhaps
of marriage at a later age for both males and females, thereby reducing the high fertility rate that had contributed to the growth of
population up to the thirteenth century.
In conclusion, it is clear that Norwegian farming and farming
systems changed considerably from ca. 800 to ca. 1350, involving
the farmers social and economic status, their household organization, farm houses, farm territories and rural landscapes. The yields
of farming increased at least up to the mid-thirteenth century, as a
result of land clearing and more intensive and improved cultivation
of arable and corresponding exploitation of outfields and wasteland. Whatever relation there was between the growth of agricultural production and population it seems evident that farming and
farming systems in the period were not static. However, we have
seen that developments were not unilinear or uniform all over the
country; there were considerable regional differences.
Although domestic agricultural conditions differed from those
in more southerly European regions, there has been a tendency to
overemphasize the uniqueness of Norwegian farming. It should
therefore be noted that there are also striking similarities between
the development of Norwegian medieval farming and farming systems, particularly in the southern part of the country, and those of
southern Scandinavia and northern Europe in general.
128
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Side 129
Karlsy
FINNMARK
Malangen
TROMS
NORDLAND
Trondheim
Jmtland
TRNDELAG
Borgund
VESTLANDET
Sogndal
STLANDET
Bergen
Oslo
TELEMARK
Jren
Bohusln
AGDER
Norway with its medieval boundaties and places mentioned in the text.
129
Kap. 2 Ingvild ye
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Side 130
Notes:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
130
Adam: p. 211.
Helle 1995: p. 3ff.
Cf. ye Slvberg 1976: pp. 2731, Mook & Salvesen 1988 with references, Lamb 1995.
Bratrein 1996: p. 10.
ye Slvberg 1976: pp. 2427, Helle 1995a: pp. 514.
Cf. Brush & Turner 1987: pp. 1113.
Helle 1995: p. 31.
Boserup 1965: p. 12ff.
Helle 1974: p. 158; Idem p. 1995a: 54, Sandnes & Salvesen 1978: p. 110.
Sandnes & Salvesen 1978: p. 117.
A.o. Berglund 1995, T. Iversen 1996, F. Iversen 1999a.
Referred to in the Icelandic Landnmabok: p. 248, p. 289, p. 328, p. 362.
Helle 1974: p. 160, p. 238 with references.
Duby 1998: p. 19.
Helle 1974: p. 51.
Reynolds 1994: p. 53, T. Iversen 1995: p. 174, Skre 1999: p. 124.
Cf. T. Iversen 2001, Myking 2002.
Helle 2001: p. 119 with references.
A.o. claimed by Holmsen and O.A Johnsen. Cf. Hansen 1999 referring to this debate.
Robberstad, KLNM XII: pp. 493497.
Cf. a.o. NiYR III: pp. 6873, pp. 7699, pp. 14448, p. 225, p. 276: NiYR: pp. 1318.
L V 7.
Ibid.
A. o. Lunden 1995, T. Iversen 1995, 1996, 1999, Skre 1998, 1999, Drum 1999 a & b.
T. Iversen 1995, Skre 1998.
T. Iversen 1996, F. Iversen 1998, Idem 1999a and b, Berglund 1995.
G 75; F XIII 4, L VII 10, 52.
Winchester 1987: p. 102 (about Cumbria), Poulsen 1997: p. 125.
Cf. ye 2002: p. 302.
G145.
Cf. ye 2002: p. 367ff with references.
Cf. Krag 1995: p. 85 for discussion of this term.
Severeal locations have been suggested: Bjarky (Sandmo 1994: p. 174), Helgy (Bratrein 1989: pp.
17576), Senja or Hillesy (Odner 1983: p. 23).
Kap. 2 Ingvild ye
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Notes
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
Mundal 1996: p. 106, L. Olsen 1998: p. 53; Bratrein 1996: p. 13.

Odner 1989: pp. 148149, Bratrein 1989: p. 199, Hansen 1990: p. 118, Storli 1994: p. 16.
I. Zachrisson 1997, L. Olsen 1998.
Archaeological excavations have demonstrated that farms traditionally dated to the Late Iron Age and
Middle Ages can be older (ye (ed.) 2002).
Bratrein 1989: p. 195, p. 201, Bertelsen 1994: p. 203.
Skre 1997: p. 47, Solberg 2000: p. 150.
F. Iversen 1998, 1999a & b, T. Zachrisson 1998: p. 167.
F. Iversen 1999a.
The following account of place-names is mainly based on Akselberg 1996.
NgL II: 420.
Sandnes & Stemshaug 1980: p. 260, Harsson 1990: p. 76.
Sandnes 1971: p. 43 with references, Andersen 1977: p. 210.
Sandnes 1971: p. 46, Marthinsen 1996: p. 155.
Marthinsen 1996.
Dodgshon 1980.
Cf. Sandnes 1979: p. 166, Bjrkvik KLNM: pp. 62531.
Hertzberg 1895: p. 128.
Holmsen et al. 1956: p. 29.
Cf. Sandnes 1979: p. 166.
Bjrkvik 1956: p. 48, Salvesen 1996: p. 47.
Widgren 1997: p. 10, p. 116.
DN VI no 84, ye 1986: p. 411.
Sandnes 1968, Lunden 1969, Idem 2000, Sandnes & Salvesen 1978, Marthinsen 1996.
L VII 53, 54; NgL: p. 484.
Bertelsen & Lamb 1995.
ye 2000.
Porsmose 1981: p. 23, Liebgott 1989: p. 26.
Cf. Bjrkvik 1956: p. 50ff.
G 81.
Lunden 2000: p. 63.
Benedictow 1993.
Sandnes & Salvesen 1978.
ye 2002: p. 251 with references.
Ibid: p. 393 with references.
Ibid: p. 266 with references.
Cf. Hybel 1989.
A.o. Sandnes 1971.
G 255, 296, 299; G 70.
Hkr II: p. 30.
T. Iversen 1997: pp. 3940.
Sweden c. 1330: Myrdal 1999: p. 96, England c. 1100 Duby 1998: p. 193, p. 208, p. 269, p. 279.
T. Iversen 1997: p. 43.
Sandnes 1983.
F XIII 6, G 77, G 198, Cf. Helle 2001: pp. 12728.
T. Iversen 1997: pp. 87101.
Ibid: pp. 102104.
131
Kap. 2 Ingvild ye
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Notes
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
132
G 106, F IX 11, Cf. T. Iversen 1997: pp. 21718 and Helle 2001: pp. 129130.
G 76; F XIII 2; L VIII 1.
Cf. ye 2002: pp. 27375 with references.
DN no 26.
Helle 1974: p. 156.
Porsmose 1988, Myrdal 1999: p. 173.
Cf. ye 2002: p. 272.
Dodgshon 1980: p. 40.
Cf. Duby 1998: pp. 23839, pp. 25759, p. 274.
Hjulstad 1984: pp. 2425.
Myrdal 1999: pp. 3436, Porsmose 1988.
Berg 1989.
G 81; LVIII 15, Bjrkvik 1956.
Bjrkvik 1956, Idem 1959.
Cf. Dodgshon 1980: p. 26.
Ibid.: p. 38.
Bjrkvik 1956.
L VIII 30. Cf. ye 2000: pp. 1718.
Holmsen et al. 1956: p. 80.
Kaland 1987: p.179, Kvamme 1982: p. 57, Austad, ye et al. 2001: p. 158.
Behre 1975, Poulsen 1997: p. 120, Hoppenbrowers 1997: p. 95.
F II 30, 34.
L VII 15.
ye Slvberg 1976: pp. 116117.
Land could also be left follow for a longer period. Cf. ye 2002: pp. 303305.
G 75.
Heg 1994: p. 17, Hosar 1994: p. 132.
G 6.
F IV 44, Sandnes 1971: p. 85, ye Slvberg 1976: p. 130.
Nedkvitne 1977, Idem 1983.
ye 1998: pp. 4850 with references.
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 198283, Kvamme 1988, Bjrgo et al. 1992,
Skrede 2002) and more sporadically in the uplands of stlandet (Block-Nackerud & Lindblom 1994,
Bergstl 1997, Narmo 2000).
Reinton 195561, ye 2002: pp. 36976.
Cf. ye 2002: pp. 37376 with references.
Timberlid 1988.
Holmsen 1961: p. 260. Cf. Postan 1973.
Petersen 1951.
Myrdal 1997: p. 160. In England in the 10th cent. (Astill 1997: p. 207).
ye Slvberg 1976: pp. 106110.
Cf. Astill & Langdon 1997.
Jerpsen 1996.
Kap. 2 Ingvild ye
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Side 133
Notes
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
Cf. ye Slvberg 1976: p. 95.

Cf. ye 2002: p. 334.
Poulsen 1997: p. 131; Myrdal 1997: p. 163.
ye Slvberg 1976: pp. 9597, Astill 1992: p. 94.
Found in the Oseberg burial; ye Slvberg 1976: p. 105 with references.
Ibid. pp. 195106.
ye Slvberg 1976: p. 120.
ye Slvberg 1976: pp. 117120 with references, cf. Poulsen 1997: pp. 13639.
ye 2002: pp.345347 with references.
Poulsen 1997: p. 138, Astill 1997.
Cf. Myrdal 1997 denoting these interdependent changes as a technological complex.
Nedkvitne 1977, idem 1983.
ye 1998.
Lunden 1978, 262, ye 1986: p. 330.
ye 1998.
Lindanger 1987: p. 173.
133
Kap. 2 Ingvild ye
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Side 134
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Kap.

Farming systems and rural

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Agricultural conditions and rural

Two adjectives spring to mind at the start of an overview of

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Viking and Middle Ages than it is today, with an optimum in ca.

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

saw the recording in writing of a rich historical literature and

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Distribution of ownership of land

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Percentages of freehold in southern and

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

seems clear that donations to ecclesiastical institutions, and also to

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

The concept of ownership

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

tected the hereditary right of descendants to land at a time when

Splitting up of landed property through inheritance

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Origin and development of the tenancy system

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Agreement on land lease

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Rights to the wasteland private or common?

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Settlement and population

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

draught animals and manure, crucial for maintaining the fertility of

Land clearing and subdivision of farms

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

The settlement expansion in Trndelag was more restricted

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Dispersed settlement or agglomeration?

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

and could later develop into separate named farms. Holdings in

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

colonists was stimulated by a deliberate royal policy of rewards in

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Farming of subdivided farms

Population size and growth

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

lements were found in more peripheral and marginal parts of the

The decline of the fourteenth century

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

agrarian production in late medieval Norway. The results of the

Climate curve for Trndelag

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Slavery and its disappearance

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

A native male slave in his best age between 15 and 40 years

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

The conditions of tenants and freeholders

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

Ingvild ye: Farming systems and rural societies ca. 8001350

royal power fostered the traditional assumption that the medieval

Mobile or stationary farmers?