Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 121
119S L Í M U S E T U R IN EARLY ICELANDIC LAW
access to it was uneven and often quite restricted. Such rights and limits
were understood as norms and expressed as custom (consuetudines). In Old
Icelandic sagas, where the itinerant kingship of the Norwegian king, and
occasionally that of others, repeatedly comes to the forefront, the king’s
movement and upkeep is bound by lǫg, venja, siðvenja, vanði, and the like.
In fact, much energy is spent in the kings’ sagas on the adjudicative process
between king and aristocracy of setting these limits and how the king must
share power with those who back him up.17
Exacting hospitality was practiced or claimed by various lords and po-
litical potentates high and low, both secular and ecclesiastical. Sometimes
it was regular, sometimes spasmodic and ad hoc. It was often disputed and
led not infrequently to confrontation and conflict. Enforcing hospitality
and imposing oneself on others is, in any case, a form of political violence,
even when negotiated and channeled. Importantly, it was not simply a mat-
ter of finances but mainly a matter of political display, a visual verification
of power relations acted out before witnesses.
The story of how and why the curbing of enforced hospitality became
a legislative theme among high medieval legislators belongs to the larger
story of Western Europe’s societal transformation during that period,
which was characterized not least by growing institutionalization and cen-
tralization of power.18 The earliest steps in this direction had already been
taken in the political climate of mid- and late-tenth-century Italy but were
soon made north of the Alps too. Initially, kings would attempt to shut the
door on forceful members of the political elite via charters of protection
for those suffering their visits, principally cities. Once kings assumed the
role of active legislators, however, as the king of Norway did in the later
thirteenth century, they sought to establish more general rules to this effect
through law, linking this agenda to public peace and order.
Coming into the eleventh century in France, so-called banal lords or
castellans with their bands of milites imposed their political will on local
societies, using force when necessary. Their belligerent behavior and arbi-
trary use of violence thrived not least because of the relative weakness of
17 See Viðar Pálsson, Language of Power, 58‒122 for references to sagas and secondary sources
regarding the development of the royal fisc in Norway and the regulated royal itinerary
bound by it.
18 See, e.g., R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970‒1215, The Making of Europe
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000).