Scientific Inttlliyence — Geology, 389 



This circumstance has been of great infiuence in the middle ages on 

 the social condition of the Northmen. Castles of nobles or kings, 

 comm,anding the country round, and secure from sudden assault by 

 the strength of the building, could not be constructed, and never ex- 

 isted in Norway. The huge fragments and ruins of baronial castles 

 and strongholds, so characteristic of the state of society in the 

 middle ages in the feudal countries of Europe, and so ornamental 

 in the landscape now, are wanting in Norway. The noble had 

 nothing to fall back upon but his war-ship ; the king nothing but 

 the support of the people. In the reign of our King Stephen, when 

 England was covered with the fortified castles of the nobility, to the 

 number, it is somewhere stated, of 1500, and was laid waste by 

 their exactions and private wars, the sons of Harald Gille — the 

 Kings Sigurd, Inge, and Eystein — wei'e referring their claims and 

 disputes to the decision of Things of the people. In Normandy and 

 England the Northmen and their descendants felt the want in their 

 mother country of secure fortresses for their power ; and the first 

 and natural object of the alien landholders was to build castles, and 

 lodge themselves in safety by stone walls against sudden assaults, 

 and above all against the firebrand of the midnight assailant. In 

 the mother country, to be surprised and burned by night within the 

 wooden structures in which even kings had to reside, was a fate so 

 common, that some of the kings appeared to have lived on board 

 ships principally, or on islands on the coast. 



This physical circumstance of wanting the building material of 

 which the feudal castles of other countries were constructed, and by 

 which structures the feudal system itself was mainly supported, had 

 its social as well as political influences on the people. The diflPerent 

 classes were not separated from each other, in society, by the im- 

 portant distinction of a difference in the magnitude or splendour of 

 their dwellings. The peasant at the corner of the forest could, with 

 his time, material, and labour of his family at command, lodge him- 

 self as magnificently as the king, — and did so. The mansions of 

 kings and great chiefs were no better than the ordinary dwellings of 

 the bonders. Lade, near Drontheim, — the seat before the city of 

 Drontheim, or Nidaros, was founded by King Olaf Tryggvesson, and 

 which was the mansion of Earl Hakon the Great, and of many dis- 

 tinguished men who were earls of Lade, — was, and is, a wooden 

 structure of the ordinary dimensions of the houses of the opulent 

 bonders in the district. Egge — the seat of Kalf Arneson, who led 

 the bonder army against King Olaf, which defeated and slew him at 

 the battle of Stikkleslad, and who was a man of great note and 

 social importance in his day — is, and always has been, such a farm- 

 house of logs as may be seen on every ordinary farm estate of the 

 same size. The foundation of a few loose stones, on which the 

 lower tier of logs is laid to raise it from the earth, remains always 

 the same, although all the superstructure of wood may have been 



