Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1978, Page 70

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Forn búseting í Føroyum
SUMMARY
Old, settlement in the Faroes.
From the time of the first seetlement until the end of the 19th century
life in the Faroes was based on farming and its sidelines (fishing, fowling
and the hunting of pilot whales etc.) which became linked together into
an economic whole in which the produce was divided according to the
rights of ownership or use of land. Therefore, matters of the land were
decisive for all society and have, among other things, governed the pro-
c.ess of settlement.
Research into place-names suggests that original estates of the time of
settlement included several villages and, in some cases, whole islands.
These large estates were, however, quickly divided up with the result
that one estate comprised one village. Further division of estates formed
several estates in the same village, but still standing on their own, and
the foundation was laid for býlingar. Chr. Matras estimates that this step
was taken about 1300, while Róland Høgnesen estimates that by the
period 1300—1400 only half the villages had been founded. Further divi-
sion of the býlingur-estates formed several farms (houses) in the same
býlingur, and Chr. Matras estimates thas this took place after 1600. The
pattern of settlement in the middle ages becomes thus formed of scattered
estates, one in each býlingur. This corresponds to the usual archaelogical
conception of Norse medieval estate.
In this article I have endeavoured to show by the coordinated handling
of archaeological, historical and philological sources that the above-menti-
oned division of estates must have gone ahead much more quickly than
has hitherto been accepted. In the Viking age we already have firm
archaeological indications that several estates existed in the same village
(i. e. that býlingar had already been formed in the Viking age) and in a
smgle case the possibility that several households lived on the same estate.
The oldest acceptable documentary source material shows that by the
16th century the division of býlingar into smaller farms had already come
a long way and a similar example of division has even been found in a
source from 1412. It is conceivable that the division of býlingur-esta.tes
into smaller farms, which prepares the economic foundation for several
houses in the same býlingur, began early in the middle ages and was a
direct continuation of the regular process which in the Viking age divided
up settlement estates into villages and villages into býlingar. This regular
historical process was based on the system of inheritance in force, which
is found justified in the oldest preserved Norse legislation, and is still
today practised in Faroese villages where modern legislation concerning
registration and division of land is not yet in force.
However, in the middle ages, the Church, the King and foreign nobles,