Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/140

 for each district, when he suppressed the small kings; hut they appear to have been merely collectors of his rents.

The churchmen were not a numerous or powerful class until after the first half of the 12th century. They were at first strangers, and many of them English. Nicolas Breakspear, the son, Matthew Paris tell us, of a peasant employed about the Benedictine monastery of Saint Albans in Hertfordshire, and educated by the monks there, was the first priest who obtained any political or social influence in Norway. He was sent there, when cardinal, on a mission to settle the church; and afterwards, when elected pope, 1154, under the title of Hadrian IV., he was friendly to the Norwegian people. His influence when in Norway was beneficially exerted in preventing the carrying of arms, or engaging in private feuds, during certain periods of truce proclaimed by the church. The body of priests in the peninsula until the end of the 12th century being small, and mostly foreigners from England, both in Sweden and in Norway, shows the want of education in Latin and in the use of letters among: the pagan Northmen; and shows also the identity or similarity of the language of a great portion at least of England with that of the Scandinavian peninsula.

Several of the smaller institutions in society, which were transplanted into England by the Northmen or their successors, may perhaps be traced to the mode of living which the physical circumstances of the mothercountry had produced. The kings having, in fact, no safe resting place but on board of ship, being in perpetual danger, during their progresses for subsistence on shore, to be surprised and burnt in their quarters by any trifling force, had no reluctance at all to such expeditions against England, the Hebrides, or the Orkney Islands, as they frequently undertook; and