Social Classes in the Viking Age

Chapter Summary

A fairly complete impression of Roman Iron Age corporate social order can be extracted from the Roman author, Tacitus. In the next centuries, substantial shifts suggest an attempt to overthrow this social order, which inhibited strong central authority. Viking Age rulers appear to have created a new nobility upon whom they could rely for support rather than challenges. Thus can be inferred from several lines of evidence:the terms of social relations, new forms of elite settlement, and historical accounts of transitions in the relationship between rulers and their followers. The very earliest ethnohistories, just after the Viking Age, indicate severe conflicts between local and central elite, especially in Scania and the other eastern province, Halland. The ever-increasing depth of organizational hierarchy brought inherent conflicts between the local and the central, which may be monitored through the study of decision-making hierarchies and the implications of change in their internal organization. The next chapter presents the locational analysis of the Danish polity on the scale of the state as a whole, then between east and west, and finally in the internal organization in Scania. The many indicators of the concerted elite efforts to integrate the eastern province, and resistance to these attempts, is supported by the geographic analysis.