and 851 – 2 , mentions a royal bailiff in the town. On what was probably the petty king’s
farm with the name Skiringssal, now Huseby close to Kaupang, the remains of an
aristocratic hall have been excavated. The connection between the Danish king and the
foundation of Hedeby is testified in the Royal Frankish Annals.
The urban community differed from the rural in many aspects. One of them was their
need for separate legislation. The laws for towns and trade in the twelfth century
onwards are called Bjarkøyrett, literally ‘Birka law’, in all three Scandinavian countries.
There is little doubt that the name refers to the Swedish Viking Age town. The name
tells us that the development of legislation for this kind of community started there,
probably due to it being the earliest of the four towns. The laws were then transferred,
altered and added to in the other towns of the Viking Age and later. The physical
borders of the town marked the area within which the law applied. The shallow
ditch surrounding Ribe from the early ninth century (Feveile 2006 : 43 – 5 ) could be
an example of this legislative border, possibly connected to the marketplace being
converted into a town a few years earlier.
The earliest known version of the Bjarkøyrett is no older than the mid-thirteenth
century (Hagland and Sandnes 1997 ) and therefore it is impossible to reconstruct the
Viking Age town law in detail. However, by drawing on information in Vita Ansgarii
some general themes in the early law may be identified. It seems likely that the towns in
the first half of the ninth century were under royal administration through the bailiff
and that they had their own thing assembly. One of the original tasks of the bailiff may
have been to collect the land rent from each household as described in the earliest
versions of the law. In the thirteenth-century version the thing assembly gathered to
solve conflicts and convict the guilty in certain types of crimes. This may have been the
case in the Viking Age as well.
PLOTS, STREETS AND HOUSESTown plans may be read as a manifestation of the ideas the founders had about what
an urban community was and how it should function. The administration of rights to
land, the maintenance of communal installations such as jetties and streets, the normal
resident’s need for space and water, the transport of people and goods within, to and
from the town: all of these and many more factors had to be taken into account
and realised according to the topographical conditions which each site offered. Some
standard solutions to these challenges were developed and a few of them will be
described in the following.
From the beginning the town area was divided up into plots, streets, etc. As only a
small percentage of each town is excavated, the extent of this original plot division and
the number and sizes of later extensions are unknown. However, in at least some of the
towns, especially Hedeby, which grew significantly in the tenth century, the town area
must have been extended, probably on several occasions.
In Ribe the main focus of activity was the street running through the town, parallel
to the river lying at least 40 m further to the south-west. The plots lay on each side of
this street, with their shorter end, 6 – 8 m long, towards it. The finds show that craft
and trade were focused on the part of the plot lying along the street, while the back of
the plots, extending some 20 – 30 m off the street, was used for dumping refuse. The
town area comprised forty to fifty plots and covered about 1 hectares.
–– Dagfinn Skre––