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68 The Viking Age in Denmark

combined with replanning of the cntire settlement. Such may havc taken place in connection with the coming of new types of ownerships or new systems of agriculture (perhaps even the so-called three-field system) corresponding to the intensification of cereal growing (compared with the extension of pasturcs), noted from the pollen diagrams. The stress on cereals may have been most marked in the

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Figurę 18 The Saedding settlement (wcst Jylland) from the tenth to elcventh centuries. (After Stoumann)

forested central Danish provinces with, as we have seen above, many pigs as compared with cattle and probably little pasture. In tum, smali pastures mean restricted fallow land and thus a morę intensive growing of cereals. A further factor to be taken into consideration is the mili tary organisation of the country, the so-called ‘leding’, where each ‘herred’ (territory) has to man one or morę warships. The single village and farm contribute according to their size, and it is clearly in the interest of the administration to create standard measures. Such a developmcnt is in itself a strong indicator of the coming of the State, in spite of the many problems of the continuation of settlement from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages.

Among the Viking Age place-names, the -by and -toft endings -occurring, for instance, in the Danelaw areas ofEngland in about 900 — are normally thought to imply planned villages.⁴⁰ This may create a problem of synchronisation with the local development in Denmark, which apparently was later. On the other hand, it is elear from the archaeological record that even an Iron Age village like Vorbasse in the fifth century, was, to a large extent, planned, though we are poorly informed about the field-system. (At Vorbasse we know of some exits from the compounds in the direction of the mcadows, but not of a division of these.) The ‘toft’ (croft) for a village name meant, in the early medieval law codes, the regulated plot around the farm buildings. The size of this croft determined the size of the field. The -tofts cluster on the marginal lands of Denmark, in west Jylland and in east Skane, where there is a good possibility of determining the plan of the village, and probably of its fields as well, owing to the Viking Age colonisation in the areas.⁴¹ Other names, like -torp (and also -by), indicate the generał expansion of the Viking Age settlement.⁴² But we are left with only the towns if we want to study the history of continued habitation from the Viking Age, with its link from ancient to modern Denmark.