Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 120

118 GRIPLA
slimesitting guests as a threat to the king’s peace and as in breach of the
law belongs to this saga. It may be compared with other novelties of the
Norwegian king’s law that likewise sought to expand his jurisdiction and
field of interest. However, we turn now to the broader European back-
ground, against which the introduction of this law must be read.
King and Hospitality
Feasting (convivium, veizla) was a common expression in the political
language of premodern society. Aside from friendship-making through
feasts and gifts among peers or near-peers, which was common among the
political elite or aristocracy, formal hospitality was exacted on a wide scale
by political superiors. Itinerant kingship, which was emblematic of early
and high medieval rulership, focused fiscal, social, and political ties on the
ritualistic exaction of feasts. Outwardly portrayed as a free and voluntary
action, the reception of one’s political superiors was usually anything but
that. It highlighted and cemented the unequal social and political standing
among the partakers and was contextualized by larger frameworks of pow-
er, both in its application and perception. The degree of compulsion would
vary along a scale from voluntary feasting among peers (Gastfreundschaft)
to the obligatory reception of political superiors (Herrschaftsgastung).16
The big players on the scene, itinerant kings, perambulated their do-
mains as regularly and systematically as they could, but even they faced real
limits in the theater of power. Their access to local resources for upkeep
was regulated by custom, which was subject to constant negotiation with
the aristocracy and landed elite. The royal fisc, a set of properties and as-
sets earmarked for the upkeep of the king and his court, emerged over time
out of such circumstances. The king might be its owner in name, yet his
ciety is treated in, e.g., Hillay Zmora, The Feud in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015). The non-monopoly of violence by medieval public
authorities and the sustained practice of ‘private justice’ throughout the medieval era is
well illustrated in Warren C. Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe, The Medieval World
(London: Routledge, 2011), esp. 165ff.
16 A large body of scholarship is dedicated to itinerant kingship and the political and social
implications and uses of hospitality in premodern Europe. For extensive references and
discussion of main themes, see Viðar Pálsson, Language of Power: Feasting and Gift-Giving
in Medieval Iceland and Its Sagas, Islandica 60 (Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 2017),
esp. 57‒62, 77‒82, 96‒103, 109‒10.