with separate, enclosed long-strips, in exactly the same way as in the regular Frankish,
German and Norman villages on the British islands, before a common fallow system and
subdivided fields were introduced at the beginning or in the middle of the medieval
period (Hoffman 1975 : 41 ; Dodgshon 1980 : 75 ff.; Hoff 1984 : 102 ; 1997 : 84 ff.;
Roberts 1987 : 199 ; Porsmose 1988 : 270 ; Bartlett 1993 : 114 ff.; Riddersporre 1995 :
172 ; Holst 2004 : 186 ff.). The village sizes in Scandinavia varied widely. Hamlets
consisting of two to four farmsteads have primarily been found in woodlands, moraine
and mountainous areas, as well as in the Norwegian fjord valleys. Larger villages with
fifteen to twenty and up to fifty farmsteads have first of all been found in the central
agricultural areas and could include areas of up to 400 – 500 hectares, settlement and
infields included.
Visible remnants of infields, with enclosures and fossil fields, are preserved in south-
west Norway, in Östergötland and on Öland and Gotland, and to some extent also in the
Lake Mälar area in Sweden. These are mainly composed of demolished stone walls,
which are often connected in huge systems. Previously these were mainly considered to
belong to earlier periods of the Iron Age, the Roman Iron Age and the migration period,
but new excavations and analyses of these have shown that they were also used and
constructed during the Viking Age and the medieval period (Fallgren 2006 : 31 ff.,
159 ff.; Petersson 2006 : 187 ff.). These stone walls normally enclosed the meadows and
only to a lesser extent the fields. The fields seem to be both few in number and small in
area. The farming during the Viking Age, as earlier during the Iron Age, can therefore
be characterised as a fairly pastoral economy, where cattle breeding and its products
constituted the essential part of agrarian production. This is also something that
becomes evident when comparing stables from the Viking Age with stables from the
Middle Ages and later: Viking Age stables in general housed more animals, sometimes
many more, than stables from the medieval and later periods could accommodate. In the
same way the bone material from the excavated farmsteads from the Viking Age shows
that cattle breeding was of greater importance than during the medieval period
(Myrdal 1999 : 39 ff.).
Outside the enclosed fields and meadows, on the border of the outlying land, where
the pasture began, the grave-fields of the villages were usually located. However, some-
times they were to be found somewhat further out on the common, and in these cases in
connection with more important roads. Often there were several grave-fields around
each village, which were normally exposed in order to be visible from the neighbouring
villages. The grave-fields seem therefore to have helped define or delimit the enclosed
infields of the villages, where the enclosures were the physical manifestations of the land
belonging to the different farmsteads in the villages, and where the graves can be
interpreted as the symbolic expression of ownership and the rights of inheritance to
the land ‘enclosed’ (Fallgren 2006 : 119 f., 136 ff.). There are indications that graves and
grave-fields had a function as a declaration of ownership of land and rights of inheritance
in the Christian society of Scandinavia ( Jørgensen 1988 : 50 ff.; Arrhenius 1990 : 74 ;
Ringstad 1991 : 144 ff.; Gurevich 1992 : 194 ff.; Zachrisson 1994 ; Skre 1998 : 199 ff.;
Sundqvist 2002 : 154 f., 170 ff.).
–– chapter 7 : Farm and village in the Viking Age––