Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/62

48 right, or adel,—that is, noble right; subject to no feudal burden, servitude, escheat, or forfeiture to a superior from any feudal casualty. This was the natural arrangement of society, and the natural principle of possession in a country not previously occupied, and in which the settlers had consequently no reason for submitting to feudal obligations and to a military organisation. When the very same people, these unfeudalised Northmen, came to conquer and settle in Normandy, in a country appropriated and peopled, and which they had to defend as well as to invade and occupy, they naturally adopted the feudal social arrangement necessary for their security, and maintained it in all its rigour. In the very same century the kinsmen of the same chief, Rolf Ganger, who was conquering and feudally occupying Normandy, came to settle in Iceland, where they had no occasion for the military organisation and principle of the feudal system in the unappropriated, uninhabited island; and they occupied it not feudally, but, as their ancestors had occupied the mother country itself, udally. The udal landowners, although exempt from all feudal services, exactions, or obligations to any other man as their local chief, or, in feudal language, the superior of their lands, were by no means exempt from services or taxes to the king or general chief, who was udal-born to the sovereignty of the whole or of a part of the country, and was acknowledged by the Thing or assembly of the landowners of the district. The kingly power was as great as in any feudally constituted country, either for calling out men and ships for his military expeditions abroad or at home, or for raising taxes. The scatt was a fixed land-tax, paid to the king either in money or in kind, that is, in natural products of the land, and was collected by his officers yearly in each district, or even let for a proportion of the amount to his friends or lendermen