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124 GRIPLA
Secondly, the number of retainers or followers a political superior
would have brought with him when exacting hospitality was more moder-
ate than many modern people would assume. In cases of systematic exploi-
tation of hospitality, such as that of the king, both the frequency of visits
and the number of men to be accommodated were rigorously contested
and restricted. According to the kings’ sagas, the royal hirð was originally
sixty men. Supposedly, it was doubled twice in the eleventh century, ini-
tially to one hundred and twenty by King Haraldr harðráði and then again
by his son King Óláfr kyrri, bringing it to two hundred and forty men.
Fagrskinna, Morkinskinna, and Heimskringla all contain lengthy passages
on these changes and how they were met with reluctance and suspicion by
the aristocracy, unwilling as it was to allow the king to go beyond custom-
ary limits of size when exacting feasts.28 Judging by the evidence of the
sagas, the itinerant court of Norwegian kings, accompanying him as he fór
á veizlur, would on average have numbered either in the tens or, at most,
somewhere over one hundred.29 This may be compared to early and high
medieval Carolingian and German kings, whose traveling court usually
numbered in the hundreds, sometimes even as low as three hundred; and
French, English, Sicilian, and Aragonese kings, whose retinue appears on
average to have amounted to between three and five hundred. Princes and
various lesser political heads exacting hospitality in early and high medieval
Europe, secular and ecclesiastical, made do with much smaller numbers, a
few tens of men.30
AM 322 fol, ed. Steinar Imsen (Oslo: Riksarkivet, 2000), esp. 24ff., and Didrik Arup Seip,
“Hirdskrå,” in Kulturhistorisk leksikon for nordisk middelalder fra vikingtid til reformationstid
[KLNM], 22 vols. (Reykjavík: Bókaverslun Ísafoldar, 1976), 6: 580‒82.
28 Morkinskinna, ed. Ármann Jakobsson and Þórður Ingi Guðjónsson, 2 vols., Íslenzk forn-
rit, vols. 23−24 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 2011), 2: 9; Fagrskinna — Nóregs
konunga tal, ed. Bjarni Einarsson, Íslenzk fornrit, vol. 29 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka forn-
ritafélag, 1985, 65, 301; Heimskringla, 3: 207. See also Heimskringla, 2: 72‒73, cf. Saga Óláfs
konungs hins helga, 103‒4 and Flateyjarbók, 2: 48.
29 The size of feasts and the royal retinue is studied in Viðar Pálsson, Language of Power,
89‒96.
30 Carlrichard Brühl, Fodrum, gistum, servitium regis: Studien zu den wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen des
Königtums im Frankenreich und den fränkischen Nachfolgestaaten Deutschland, Frankreich und
Italien vom 6. bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2 bks. (Köln: Böhlau, 1968), 168–71; John W.
Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c. 936−1075,
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series, vol. 21 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 58; Peyer, Gastfreundschaft zum Gasthaus, 156−57.