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66 The Viking Age in Denmark

type hall, up to thirty mctres long, which lacks the linę of roof-supporting posts down the aislc of thc house. Instead, thc walls are strengthened by oblique posts along the outer side (cf. Figs 28-9). This gives a large middle room, with spacc for a central fireplace and two antechambers, cach one-third of the length of the main room. Such houses do not have stables, and it is generally characteristic of Viking Age buildings that they show a stronger tendency towards functional specialisation than earlier ones, being also morę alike. The lavish use of wood, connected with the short life span of the buildings, must have put great pressure on the forests.

As their name suggests, the conspicuous halls are found in the famous Trelleborg-type fortresses which datę to the tenth cen tury, but recently they have occurred also in a new type of rural settlement, the magnate farm. After the abandonment of the west Jylland Vorbasse village in the fifth century, the site was unoccupied until the early Viking Age, where a new village was founded, with long-houses and pit-houses. In the latc tenth century this settlement was extended and, we believe, at least partly replaced by three gigantic farms, or rather ‘estates’, surrounded by fences, framing large crofts (the largest is 120m by about 200m) and, as in the fifth-century village, shared with the neighbouring compound (Fig. 17).³⁵ At the centre of the croft stands a Trelleborg-type hall and, adjoined to this by smaller fences are buildings comprising a smithy and a bronze founder’s workshop. Other buildings follow the periphery along the fence, of which they are part; they include large and smaller stables or stalls, other smithies and dwelling-houses; pit-houses, however, are unknown.

The magnate farms at Vorbasse have several phases, but they do not continue long into the Middle Ages, though we expect such units to have existed later too. We should not underestimate the importance of these disco veries. The size alone - but also the structure of the farms -gives the owner command over morę resources and morę assistants or servants than any earlier holder of a farmstead possessed. Furthermore, the fact that a ‘normal’ settlement gave way to the magnate farms indicates a new kind of land-holding, probably of a morę dominant kind than is found in the earlier village with its restrictions and co-operation, exemplified by the lay-out of thc sites. There is also a villagc beneath the tenth-century royal fortress of Aggersborg in north Jylland, while the contemporary Trelleborg fortress (on west Sjaelland) is perhaps built on the site of an early magnate farm.³⁶

Vorbasse is situated only some 25 kilometres to the west of the Jelling centre, and it is difficult to understand the magnate farms without reference to the wider social and political development which was taking place in west Denmark during the tenth and eleventh centuries. We havc already rcferred to the runestones as documents of succession to new rights and to new kinds of owncrship of property, and the Yorbasse estates constitute exactly such new rights to land.

Furthermore, the runestones of the contemporary Jelling and ‘After Jelling’ groups are largely connected with the high kings of Jelling, whose home province comprises the magnate farms of Vorbasse, and are thus intimately related to the political centre.

The position of Vorbasse in the west Jylland landscape, near large meadows, suggests that the raising of animals was the prime activity of the magnate farms. The same holds true ofanother contemporary group of estates, at Omgard, sonie 70 kilometres further to the north, w^Thich were also constructed over the crofts of a ninth-century Viking village wdth ‘normal’ long-houses and pit-houses.³⁷ At Omgard morę finds of artefacts have been madę than at Vorbasse. These include ceramics of high quality in the central halls and of a morę modest type in the smaller houses along the fences; Norwegian soap-stone vessels are also found and quern-stones imported from the Rhinelands. This shows that the long-distance trade of the Viking Age was not only concerned with luxuries, but also had direct economic significance for subsistence. Near the site are found cross-country fences, roads and apparently a corn-mill, perhaps grinding oats for the plentiful horses of the-farms.

The traditional Viking Age villages covering the entire period are also found in the same provinces as the magnate farms. As already shown, the settlements present different types of well-built long-houses (up to about 40m long), with curvcd or straight long walls and usually with two rows of roof-supporting posts down the aisle, supplemented not infrequently with wall-supporting posts too, especially when the interior posts are missing. The orientation is still often east-west, but stables are no longer so common in the dwelling-houses. In addition, we have a number of smaller buildings, including the many pit-houses. Also on these farms we fmd pottery of foreign character, soap-stone vessels (from Norway) and the Rhienish quern-stones.³⁸

The lay-out of the settlements is designed so that each larger long-house, as in the fifth-century Vorbasse village, lies next to one or two smali ones, plus, possibly, sonie pit-houses. The single farmstead is often surrounded by a fence. At Saedding, near present-day Esbjerg on the west coast ofjylland, the compounds lic around a rectangular open plaża (150m by 30m) remaining in the same place throughout the history of the site, while the orientation of the long-houses changes from east-west to north-south (Fig. 18).³⁹ This village also has a number of wells.

Many of the settlements show a link back to the eighth century (for instance, in Skane), but norie continues much after the first half of the eleventh century, and so far it is impossible to establish a dircct link with present-day villages, of which most go back to the Middle Ages. This discontinuity can hardly be due to climatic circumstances, and is rather a result of the short lifespan of these kinds of buildings