villages lay between 9 , 000 – 25 , 000 m^2 and the biggest could have an acreage up to
40 , 000 m^2 (Hvass 1988 : 86 ff.; Jørgensen 2001 ; Ethelberg 2003 : 353 ff.; Holst 2004 :
186 ff.). In the rest of Scandinavia these regular toft delimitations of the farms were in
general missing throughout the Viking Age. Instead the buildings of the farms in these
regions were often irregularly placed and totally or partly adjusted according to the local
topography. Often the houses were placed on built-up terraces or plateaus, on smaller
ridges or on slopes, or the farms were placed on a limited plane surface in a very hilly
landscape. The farms’ fences were made of stone and/or wood and were connected to
and from the farm in diverse directions, often as cattle paths, which led the cattle from
the farm to the pasture on the unfenced outlying land (Liedgren 1998 ; Olsen 1998 ;
Ramqvist 1998 ; Lillehammer 1999 ; Göthberg 2000 ; Selinge 2001 ; Myhre 2002 ; Åqvist
2006 ).
When it comes to how the villages were structured during the Viking Age, there
seem to have been fairly large regional differences within the Nordic area. In the most
southern part of Scandinavia there were more regularly shaped villages already at the end
of the Viking Age, especially in the south of Jutland, where the farms had developed
very regularly formed plot boundaries, and this is most clearly seen in the completely
excavated village at Vorbasse (Figure 7. 3 ) (Hvass 1988 : 89 ; Ethelberg 2003 : 354 ; Holst
Figure 7. 3 Farms with their yards and buildings in the Viking Age village at Vorbasse, Jutland,
Denmark. (Drawing: S. Hendriksen; Museum Sønderjylland. In: Det sønderjyske landbrugs Historie
2000 : 370 fig. 235 .)
–– chapter 7 : Farm and village in the Viking Age––