Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/116

 pears to have been esteemed, it was no obstacle even to the succession to the crown that the mother, as in the case of Magnus the Good, had been a slave. This was the consequence of polygamy, in which, as in the East, the kings indulged. Harald Haarfager had nine wives at once, and many concubines; and every king, even King Olaf the Saint, had concubines as well as wives; and we find polygamy indulged in down to about 1130, when Sigurd the Crusader's marriage with Cecilia, at the time his queen was alive and not divorced, was opposed by the Bishop of Bergen, who would not celebrate it; but nevertheless the priest of Stavanger performed the ceremony, on the king's duly paying the church for the indulgence. Polygamy appears not to have been confined to kings and great men; for we find in the old Icelandic law book, called the "Grey Goose," that, in determining the mutual rights of succession of persons born in either country, Norway or Iceland, in the other country, it is provided that children born in Norway in bigamy should have equal right as legitimate children,—which also proves that in Iceland civilisation was advanced so much farther than in Norway that bigamy was not lawful there, and its offspring not held legitimate. Each little estate was the kingdom in miniature, sometimes divided among children, and again reunited by succession of single successors by udal-born right vesting it in one. These landowners, with their entailed estates, old families, and extensive kin or clanship, might be called the nobility of the country, but that, from their great numbers and small properties, the tendency of the equal succession to land being to prevent the concentration of it into great estates, they were the peasantry. In social influence they had no class, like the aristocracy of feudal countries, above them. All the legislation, and the administration of law also, was in their hands. They alone conferred the crown at their Things. No man, however clear