21 (684)

36 The Viking Age in Denmark

Figuro 7 B. ‘After Jelling’ stones in Skinę. Signatures as in Fig. 7 A. L = thc city ofLund

a rcgional pattern would emerge, covering a period of sonie twcnty-five or fifty years, and madę up entirely of men whosc fathcrs, mothers and wives were all gone at the time of death and whose sons were not old enough to take over their position. A suggestion is that the persons representcd in this sub-clustcr were connected, for a couple of generations, with the active manning of the longships of Kings Sven and Knud in the Baltic district. Furthermore, roads were maintained; someone, for instance, is cited as responsible for building a bridge.²⁹ In return a grant of land was given, which must have comprised at least as much as a village, or the equivalent, as we learn from one ofthe Stones where the brother ‘had’ this.³⁰ Another brother was a ship's captain, and one of the faeller ‘did not flee at Uppsala (in Sweden), but fought as long as he had wcapons’.³¹ Three, perhaps four, brothers and the małe relativc referred to were drengs, in this connection possibly captains of warships (‘styresmaend’, steersmen), like the faelle and dreng Erik who fell during King Sven’s siege of Hedeby.³²

In about 1025, after the conquest of England, the obligations may have discontinued and the holdings have fallen to the family at large, as in thc case of the eastern persons of the south Skane cluster. In the eastern sub-cluster, apart from the father of a dreng mentioncd above, we have three thegns, a bomand (residing man, perhaps a petty