The Ribe plots were established at the beginning of the marketplace period and were
basically the same after it was converted into a town. Birka was founded with a some-
what different structure. The main focus here was the harbour. The streets run either
parallel to the shoreline or at a right angle to it. The plots have their short end towards
the harbour, they have the same width as the Ribe ones; but they are less than half as
deep. At its largest Birka covered c. 6 hectares and must have had well over 100 plots.
In the two towns established in the early 800 s, Kaupang and Hedeby, the structure is
much the same as in Birka. Both are focused on the harbour, and the system of streets has
the same alignment as Birka’s. All the six excavated plots in Kaupang have their short
end towards the harbour. In Hedeby the same general rule applies but with some
deviations, possibly due to larger surfaces being excavated and therefore more details
known. Plots in Kaupang and Hedeby have about the same size as in Birka. Kaupang
was in total somewhat smaller than Birka, about 5. 4 hectares and 90 – 100 plots, while
Hedeby was the largest town covering c. 24 hectares.
The focus on the street rather than the harbour in Ribe is probably an element
borrowed from Frisian settlements of the period ( Jensen 2004 : 243 ). By the time plots
and streets in Birka were laid out the idea of town organisation had changed somewhat.
Birka, Kaupang and Hedeby all have their focus on the harbour, probably reflecting the
Scandinavian emphasis on seafaring and seaways transport at the time. There is great
stability in the width and alignment of plots, as these elements remained nearly
unaltered from the laying out of Ribe onwards. The depth of plots was reduced after
Ribe, probably as a consequence of more congested space due to several parallel rows of
plots being laid out in the other towns. In each town the system of plots and main
streets was established from the start and was thereafter rarely altered, although
extensions may have taken place.
This rather uniform layout of streets and size of plots differ from what is seen
elsewhere in northern Europe during this period. The fact that the same principles
were applied when the Scandinavians established their urban communities in York and
Dublin later in the ninth century supports the idea that we are faced with a specific
Scandinavian way to organise towns.
As mentioned, the settling of each town took some time and initially many plots
were uninhabited. In Kaupang one of the six plots excavated in 2000 – 2 proved never to
have had a house; it was probably kept as a pigsty, at least in the first half of the ninth
century, which is the period from which the remains of houses etc. were preserved (Pilø
2007 ). In Birka one of the excavated plots, which used to house a bronzeworker’s
workshop, was uninhabited for some years, possibly decades, before a new house was
built there. But the normal thing in all towns seems to have been that each plot had one
building on it, although in Hedeby there was sometimes in addition a shed. Normally,
the houses, all of them built of wood, had the same alignment as the elongated plots.
The excavated houses vary somewhat in construction, size and function but are
nevertheless, as far as we know them, surprisingly uniform. As only trenches have been
excavated in Ribe we know little about houses there. In the three other towns houses are
generally about 4 – 5 m wide and 6 – 12 m long. In the excavated Hedeby and Birka
houses the walls normally carried the roof; in some Kaupang houses it was supported by
freestanding posts within the house. Such houses have also been found in the outskirts of
Birka. Both construction principles are common in rural settlements of the time,
although the rural houses are normally larger.
–– chapter 8 : The development of urbanism in Scandinavia––