Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/211

 saga and his traditional verses, gave way at once before the clerk, with his paper, pen, and ink. Both occupations— that of the viking and of the scald—fell as it were at once, and in one generation,—in the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century; and the wild, unquiet, ambitious spirits, in the small Icelandic population, which were formerly absorbed by them, were thrown back into their native island, and there, like tigers shut up together in a den, they preyed on or worried each other. In Scandinavia itself the same causes produced in that age the same effects. The Birkebeiners and the Baglers, who, from the middle of Magnus Erlingsson's reign, raised their leaders alternately to the Norwegian crown, were in reality the vikings, driven from the seas to the forests,—were the daring, the idle, the active of society, who could find no living or employment in the ordinary occupations of husbandry, which were preoccupied by the ordinary agricultural population, nor in the few branches of manufacture or commerce then exercised as means of subsistence; and whose former occupations of piracy at sea, or marauding expeditions on land under foreign vikings, was cut off by the progress of Christian influences on conduct,—of the power of law, and of the naval, military, and commercial arrangements in all other countries. The employments and means of living peaceably were not increased so rapidly, as the employment given by private warfare on sea and land had been put down; and in all Europe there was an overpopulation, in proportion to the means of earning a peaceful livelihood, which produced the most dreadful disorders in society. This was probably the main cause of the unquiet, unsettled state of every country, from the 11th century to the 15th. The Crusades even appear to have been fed not more by fanaticism, than by this want of employment at home in every country. Law and social order were begin-