town, and by the term "pickadyke" once applied to the turf wall which bounded it. A Pictish system taken over by the invading Northmen is decidedly suggested, though unfortunately the Saga is too busied with the exploits of the sea-roving earls to trouble about such pacific details as that.

But once the Norsemen were settled in the isles and the begetters of the system were fled or dead or slaves, the history of the towns and the Viking people who lived in them can be traced from saga, charter, doom of court, and inference from many things observed, right down from the heroic age of warring jarls and chieftains to uneventful yesterday. One such history, the annals of the town and family of Stourgarth, may serve to epitomise the whole story of what happened all over this Viking archipelago.

It is an absolutely true story in the sense that every incident certainly happened to one of these ancient township families, only as written records of an early date are rare and precious things in Orkney (owing to dampness, carelessness, and a dozen other nesses), no family and no township has been left with a continuous history of its own. We get here a glimpse of this family, and there a glimpse of that, till about the beginning of the sixteenth century, when we have a flood of light on a great many of them at once. Their resemblance to one another at that time is so marked that one knows they must have travelled by the same road, and that it is quite safe to piece together the head of one family and the body of another, and the legs of a third, and call the whole a type. This sketch in short is an accurate history of a type-a kind of composite photograph.

no longer worth breaking out. Beyond the dyke was deep soft heather, save by the banks of the burn where rough snipehaunted meadows straggled, in summer all pink and blue and yellow with wild flowers, in winter under water half the time. A little farther up the burn began the smaller, steeper-sloping town of Lingsetter, another "bu "of Biorn's, and beyond that the hills rose to meet the skyline, and the burn flowed in a brackenbanked dell down from its springs.

The

In front of the township the sea glimmered on fine days and beat in grey incessant waves on foul, the brown and green islands beyond sometimes shining like gems, sometimes lost in a clammy haar. pipings and ories of sea-birds were never silent, the scent of the seaweed was always in the air, and the low skyline and vast expanse of sky gave an extraordinary sense of space and width, so that in that dwelling on the water's edge you felt half on sea and half on shore.

The hall itself was long and steep-roofed, with great fires burning down the middle and benches alongside them and across one end, and weapons hung upon the walls between the red and green embroidered ourtains that hid the doorways of the sleeping chambers (which were like small staterooms with one berth). Other steep-roofed buildings flanked it kitohen and women's apartments and stables and

VOL. CCVII.-NO. MCCLIV.

never a sign of tower or parapet or bastion or any sort of fortification; for though Biorn lived too soon to study the works of Captain Mahan, he realised perfectly that sea-power spells security. It is true that an evil-tempered neighbour (annoyed perhaps by noticing the spear of Biorn's brother-in-law in the body of his second cousin) might put a torch to the hall some dark night-and it was constructed to burn very readily, but a man was scarcely to be called a man who took too elaborate precautions to avoid an odd risk like that.

Also, such an accident was hardly likely to befall a chieftain of the great Earl Thorfinn, conqueror of the Seot King, friend of Macbeth, and ruler of nine earldoms in Sootland, all the Southern Isles, and a great realm in Ireland. War abread but peace at home, and an iron hand in both, was the great Earl's rule and practice.

of

Too much peace and any idleness were the lord Stourgarth's chief aversions. When his Earl was on the warpath he followed him; when he was not, he made a little voyage each summer on his own account, sailing in a long shallow ship with a terrible effigy on the prow that looked like a serpent crossed with a dragon, in company with his own private band of picked retainers, and any neighbour whe cared to risk a reckless life and invest a sharp sword in a thoroughly sporting venture.

2 N

Before he sailed, he and the retainers worked like Trojans on his "bu" getting the seed in, and after he came back they worked still harder getting the harvest in. Conscientious drinking, peg te peg with any challenger, and strenuous athletics (he was a noted exponent of football played under a breezy code that generally left a good deal of blood on the pitch), kept idleness afar through the long tempestuous nights and short dark days of winter; while various odd times were filled in by what a critical modern would probably distinguish as his duties. To Biorn each item of his programme was equally incumbent on a self-respecting gentleman, and this last he would himself have distinguished merely as the least entertaining.

The great Earl till his latter days lived mostly in his realm of Caithness, and over the isles he "set up his men." Biorn was one of those set up, and, keeping watch and ward himself, "settling cases between men" within the district under him, and riding or sailing each spring to the great annual thing or parliament of all the island

chieftains, were the duties. He did them as thoroughly as he did everything else, not favouring his own kinsfelk teo unduly-yet remembering that blood was thicker than water, even if the law had to be strained a trifle, standing no nonsense from the common sort and very little from the great, and respecting the liberty of the subject so

long as the subject respected him.

In appearance this conscientious Viking magnate had been remarkably prepossessing till a battle-axe came in contact with his helmet and twisted both nose-piece and nose-the latter permanently. He still remained a rare specimen of the upstanding, blue-eyed, fine-featured, yellow-bearded type; and the twisted nose, if it impaired his beauty, gave him a very formidable aspect. Being, like all his race, a humorist, he was in the habit of oracking many jokes generally rather grim-at the expense of this blemish, and answered to the sobriquet "Crooked-nose" with infinite relish. It took him, he felt, a step nearer the little band of immortals whose exploits should be sung for generations after they were gone. In fact, it struck him as an epithet specially designed for a heroic couplet.

In addition to his warlike and administrative virtues, he was also an authority on matters of pedigree, particularly his own, tracing himself to a giant with two heads who had come from Turkey twenty-six generations previously, and knowing precisely in what cousinage he stood (fourth, sixth, or tenth) to a distinguished baronial house in Normandy, two or three bekilted Hebridean chiefs, a Norwegian earl, an Icelandic chieftain who had recently achieved notoriety by burning no fewer than sixteen of his most inconvenient neighbours

in

Seven days thereafter happened something which to all concerned was a mere matter of course, but which to the wise-after-the-event seems a plain finger-post pointing to the downward path along which that old Viking society, as Biorn knew it, was doomed surely and inevitably to pass. It took the outward form of a meeting at the hall, of his heirs and a small selection of wise and weighty men, with a background of tables laid and flagons filled. After due deliberation the wise and weighty men divided (in accordance with the law) the whole estate of Biorn, lands and goods and chattels, equally between his three tall sons. Thorkell as eldest chose the head bu of Stourgarth. The bu of Lingsetter went to the second, and another bu in another district to the third. With his share Thorkell took a few small farms; with theirs the brothers took a larger slice of the profits of old Biorn's

overseas ventures; and three diminished chieftains appeared instead of one great chief.

By an unfortunate coinoidenee, which tended to perpetuate this result, the happy hunting-grounds of the gentlemen adventurers were by this time getting circumscribed. Some had been looted bare, in others Viking bands had settled and knew too much about the game, and in others again energetic kings and counts had taken inconvenient steps to guard their coasts; while, to add to the gentleman adventurer's handicap, he had somewhat thoughtlessly turned Christian, and his priest was beginning to expostulate with him on awkward moral grounds. These causes between them absolutely killed Vikingism in Norway and Denmark about this time; but whether it was that the Orkney adventurer was more persevering, or less priestridden, or simply nearer temptation, he certainly followed

a generation or two longer. But even he followed them less regularly and less profitably, until at last an Orkney landowner who went a-roving was regarded as exceedingly old-fashioned, much as a squire to-day would be who still dined at six o'olook.

Had Thorkell and his spouse been so careless of the future of his house as to rear up half a dozen sons, a very serious strain would have been put upon its position in the world. But fortunately for its continued dignity, they lived in an age of many accidents, when lives stopped abruptly and funerals were frequent. Two sons died in infancy for want of a medicine-man, and another through calling one in. A fourth died of a spearthrust, and a fifth of drowning, so that when Thorkell joined his fathers, Generation III. was represented by a single heir, and the estate had respite from the wise and weighty men.

Number Three was a very proper man-most chieftainlike, all were agreed. He orusaded to Jerusalem with the famed Earl Rognvald, and returned bearing himself with a grace learned in Mediterranean courts, attired in fashionable foreign garments that were the envy of all beholders when he displayed himself in the new Cathedral of St Magnus. A wealthy bride and a lucky voyage or two with Sweyn Asleifson, last of the Vikings, left his sons a handsome patrimony

But luck like that could not last for ever. Such a family based on such an estate must inevitably dwindle, slowly perhaps but certainly. Feudalism had its defects, but it was a rare cement, and this Norse society was absolutely without it. The Earl had his private estates, and these he might set on tack, but he never granted them by charter. The gifts of the pious and the forfeitures of the wicked steadily swelled the Church lands to great dimensions, but they were jealously reserved for the Kirkmen. The Odal landowners, these freemen holding their estates of hereditary right acquired from no man but their own ancestors, some of them wealthy and high-born like the early lords of Stourgarth, some small farmers: rich and poor, they all saw their lands, the whole basis of their being, gradually crumble away, though probably so very gradually they hardly realised what W88 happening.

On the other hand, as every member of every family had rights in his ancestral property, which he could only extinguish by selling them himself, and which he had to offer in the first place to his kinsmen, these estates were held on such a striot entail that though the individual might grow poorer, the estate as a whole could hardly hardly escape from the family even if it