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96 The Viking Age in Denmark

‘Slavonian’ pottery, madc howcvcr with local clay. In addition, a single coin and a couplc ofweights have been found, while a few pieccs ofjewellery and sonie glass beads ultimately point to western Europę. The site might be intcrpreted as a market place with sonie craft production and be seen as an eastern Danish equivalent of the permanent and regulated towns of Hedeby and Ribe. The Iow wali is a fencing of the territory - which was morę than twice the size of the central settlement at Hedeby - rather than a means of defence.

A possibly similar site lies at Lynaes in north Sjadland.⁷⁸ In addition, many of the craft and even trading activitics of the towns also took place in the large Trelleborg fortresses of the tenth century, but probably on 3 morę cxclusive basis.

E. Fortresses andfortifications

The impressive Trelleborg-type fortresses of the tenth century, with their strict plan, ring walls and blocks of identical halls, are tra-ditionally considered to have served only military purposes (PI. I and Fig. 28).⁷⁷ A careful investigation of the Fyrkat site, in north Jylland, however, has revealed that this is only part of the picture.⁷⁸ Rather, the fortresses were planned military sites, perhaps not dissimilar in function to the fortresses of‘burh’-type of King Alfred’s England in the latc ninth century.⁷⁹ In shape, the Danish sites have striking parallels among the south-west Holland ring walls, like Oost-Souburg; its datę, unfortunately, is unclear but it seems to have been in existcnce at least by 1000, though it was without houses until the eleventh century.⁸⁰ The structures of the Dutch site differ from the Danish ones, but the symmetrical lay-out is also characterised here by straight, plank-covered axis streets, Crossing each other at right angles, and leading through four gates in the rampart. Earlier ring forts in Denmark are but poor ‘proto-types’ for the Trelleborg-type, as for example the ninth-century Lembecksburg on the Fóhr island, off the west coast of south Jylland.⁸¹ The rampart of Lembecksburg is ten metres high, the diameter 1(X) metres, making the site rather similar in size to a Frankish fort of the same period, with parallels, tor instance, in Holstein. It may perhaps have been connected with the mid-ninth-century Danish fiefof Rurik, an exiled pretender to royal power in Denmark, backed by the Franks (Chapter2 B). Other morę modest sites may also datę from the early Viking Age, but norie display the symmetry of the Trelleborg-type.

In terrns of the ring wali alone, the Trelleborg tortresses, Aggersborg on the northern shore of the Limtjord in north Jylland, Fyrkat in north-cast Jylland, near present-day Hobro, and Trelleborg itself, on west SjaTland, have contemporary parallels in the Non-nebakken rampart at Odense and probably at Arhus too. The Arhus

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Figurę 28 Fortresses of the Trelleborg-type. A = Aggersborg (north Jylland). 13 = Fyrkat (north Jylland). C = Trelleborg (west Sjaelland). Notę cemetcries. Scal 1:4(XX). (After Olsen et al.)