Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/61

Rh and however warlike and numerous we may conceive these invaders to have been, they could he but a handful compared to the numbers of the old indigenous inhabitants. They of necessity, and for security, had to settle as they had conquered, in military array, under local military chiefs whose banners they had followed in war, and were, for safety and mutual protection, obliged to rally around in peace. The people had the same military duties to perform to their chiefs, and their chiefs to the general commander or king, as in the field. They were, in fact, an army in cantonments in an enemy's country; and this, which is the feudal system, is the natural system of social arrangement in every country taken possession of by invaders in spite of the indigenous original inhabitants. It is found in several provinces of India, in several of the South Sea Islands, and wheresoever men have come into a country and seized the land of the first occupants. But where there is none to disturb the invaders—where they are themselves the first occupants, this military arrangement is unnecessary, and therefore unnatural. The first invaders of Scandinavia have entered into an unhinhabited or unappropriated country, or if inhabited, it has been by a wandering or very unwarlike population, like the present Laplanders, or the Fenni of Tacitus. We are entitled to draw this conclusion from the circumstance that these invaders did not occupy and sit down in the country feudally. Each man possessed his lot of land without reference to or acknowledgment of any other man,—without any local chief to whom his military service or other quit-rent for his land was due,—without tenure from, or duty or obligation to any superior, real or fictitious, except the general sovereign. The individual settler held his land, as his descendants in Norway still express it, by the same right as the king held his crown—by udal