25 (555)

44 The Viking Age in Denmark

that he is rcmembered by another małe person, but the dead ‘good’ drengs clearly rest in a family context: a son was killed off the coast of Blekinge and a brother killed ‘outrageously’. The third dreng, a son, apparently also ‘died’; the stone is raised for a brother of the dreng too, but, interestingly enough, the latter does not carry the dreng title. This shows clearly that ‘dreng’ connotcs an occupational position.

On Bornholm, dreng obligations may as usual have been required at a relatively young age, warfare and expeditions being all part of the life of drengs. Only one other Bornholm stone is raised for a ‘dead’ person, a father who drowned, with ‘all the ships’ captains’.⁶⁵ But whatcver the duties, property was inherited by the family at large. The Bornholm Stones are probably connectcd with the Christianisation of the island and its incorporation under the administration in Denmark after the middle of the eleventh century.⁶⁴ One of the latest Stones mentions an archbishop and should be twelfth-century in datę.⁶⁵ The thegns and the drengs, as well as the ‘dead’ expressions, cluster on the south-western quarter of the island of Bornholm, and royal vassals may have been restricted to this area. The rcmainder of the monuments on the island are normal family-stones, although a surprisingly large proportion have been raised for women. The possibility occurs, as in Southern mid-Jylland in the Jelling phase, that newcomers bolstered their position and received land by marrying daughters of Bornholm magnates.

The other historical sources basically describe the actual political behaviour of the societies whose underlying variables we try to reveal. And although political information, in a broad sense of the word, is of paramount importance, the runestones are the first data to give us a pattern of development ofsocial offices in a geographical space. In this way we have been able to make statements about the course of confhcts and formation, by the kings, of a system of dependants, whose position was bolstered by grants of land to which succession was markcd by these Stones. In other words, we can now approach the questions of production and distribution to study the underlying factors and constraints, from the climate and soil, on the pattern of settlement, as well as the organisation of towns, all of which conditioned the economy.

Chapter 4

SUBSISTENCE AND RURAL SETTLEMENT

A. Climate andsettlement

Over the past two thousand ycars Denmark has witncssed a number of minor and major climatic fluctuations, among them the well-known cold period subsequent to the Middle Ages, ‘the little Ice Age’. The medieval period itself (1000-1500) was warmer, especially in the beginning, and so was the preccding Viking Age, while the centuries around 500 were cold. We are dcaling with changes of the order of only one degree centigrade, or rather less, on a yearly basis; but they were of great consequence.

The climatic fluctuations have, logically, a bearing on the plant cover, on the quality of the harvest and on the nutrition of animals and human beings; but it is difficult to discern the relationships for past periods, although we are dealing with almost the same variables as today. One reason is incomplete climatic and botanical-zoological knowledge, another the problem of isolating human impact from natural factors when reading the record.

Recent studies of raised bogs in Denmark have shown that the degree of humification, which is dependent on the humidity of the bog, and in turn entirely related to the climate, apparently changes at approximately 260-year intervals, as measured in a negative direction (Fig. 10).¹ Visually, these changes are accompanied by transitions from layers of dark peat with a high degree of humification to layers of light peat with a Iow degree of humification, depositcd under colder and/or morę humid periods. (In cach case it is uncertain whether a lower temperaturę or a higher precipitation is the prime factor responsible.) The 260-year regularity is independent of the magnitude of the individual changes that make up the long-range climatic trends, but it serves a practical purpose as a comparison with other climatic series.

Some of the most rewarding climatic research is carried out on