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inland sea, on the Atlantic side of the dividing central Scandinavian range they called ‘the Keel’, and during this period were more involved with the British Isles, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland than with the great North-East. The events of the next 300 years were to draw them increasingly away from the West, and more deeply involve them in the politics of Danes, Germans and Swedes, but for the time being they can be left to one side.
    The Swedes and Götar, who had been joined into one commonwealthfor centuries, were by contrast almost wholly east-facing; they had no western coastline until the thirteenth century, only an upriver port at Gamla Lödöse, and their coastline on the other side began round Kalmar and went north as far as the Bothnian Gulf. Inland, the Swedes were settled most thickly in the area of modern Stockholm and Lake Mälar, the Götar in the area of the two great lakes Vätter and Väner. South of them there was a mountainous and forested region called Småland, where settlements were very sparse and political affiliations somewhat unclear, and the coastal district called Blekinge, over which the king of Denmark had had some sort of authority since the time of Old Canute – which was how Canute ‘the Great’ was usually described. Then came the Danes: the Scanians and Halländingar, inhabiting the fertile and temperate coastal valleys of what is now south-west Sweden; the Danes of the islands, of whom the most numerous were the Zealanders; and the Jutlanders, who occupied the whole peninsula down to the Eider and Kiel Fjord.
    Most Danes and Swedes were peasants, living in small rural communities, raising grain crops – chiefly barley, sometimes wheat, oats and rye – and keeping cattle, swine and ponies. The pattern of agriculture varied, but on the whole the resources of a village were shared out in much the same way as you would find in southern England at this period: two-or three-field crop-rotation, cleared grazing land in commons, fenced or unfenced according to season, with collective responsibility for keeping boundaries and respecting local custom. Outside this pattern there were the ‘fringemen’, who lived off the forest, coast and mountain by fishing, trapping, hunting and mining, and the burghers – artisans, tradesmen and innkeepers settled in boroughs and ports. This was the working population.
    Foreign observers, such as Adam of Bremen, were moderately impressed by the prosperity attained at least in Denmark: they could see abundance of corn, cattle, horses and butter, and tall, well-favoured people, if somewhat uncouth and boozy. However, medieval writers tended to judge a nation’s prosperity by the level and style of the consumption of its ruling class, and they have to be corrected by referring to other standards. The archaeology of medieval Danish villages reveals little trace of fatness: the villagers were living close to starvation, in the shadow of the three great menaces of the time – bad years, bad health and greedy landlords. For the peasants were to a large extent unfree:either thralls, or villeins owing service to lords or poor men working for others.
    The village and its inhabitants were sometimes owned by one man; sometimes the economic units into which its resources were divided – the b⊘l – were separately owned, or halved and quartered among owners; but in any case it was landownership, great or small, which sorted people out. All over the fertile districts of Denmark and Sweden villages were overlooked from far or near by the ring-fence and high-roofed hall of the landowner or bailiff, who took some of what the others could raise, and by the rather similar-looking church, which took a little more. In other places, the village freemen kept the biggest share of the community’s land in their own hands, and set their few slaves or hired men to work it. Out in the woods, particularly in Sweden, there were many communities of free peasants who both