As to be expected from a society in which domestic animals were vitally important, the earliest written laws we have surviving from Iceland contain extensive descriptions, regulations, and stipulations around the care, control, and nature of these animals. What perhaps is unexpected is the way certain animals are considered in these laws: as legal agents. Examining how these legal traditions structure the animal-human relationship and the animal-human boundary deepens our understanding of the interspecies interactions discussed in this book and can be brought together with the physical landscape of Iceland to construct the building blocks of medieval Icelandic social experience of animals. The animal-related content of Grágás has been little examined by scholars of early Iceland, and references to these laws are often used for contextualising discussion of the Icelandic sagas rather than analysed for their own sake. The value of these animal-laws, when placed alongside material and other textual evidence of animal-human interactions, has never been fully explored. Such is the purpose of this chapter: to unpick the representation of domestic animals in these laws, and to consider how the role of animals in the legal society and landscape of medieval Iceland can be brought into constructive dialogue with the other sources examined in this book.

These laws offer a narrative of daily life in an agro-pastoral Christian society and enable the visualisation of the relations between people and things, structures, and animals within this daily practice. The laws present ideal interspecies relations in medieval Icelandic society, but explicitly emphasise the variation in such encounters. Domestic animals were not part of one homogenous legal category but were placed on a spectrum of rights and protections, and each animal could be subject to differing levels of legal status and permitted agency. While the laws seem designed to control both men and animals, the capability for certain animals to act outside of this control, to shape their own actions, and work with (or against) humans is recognised by the texts. The disruptive potential of domestic animals is strongly emphasised in the focus on control we find in many of these laws, and the regulations suggest that working with animals, and the responsibility for their actions, were the domains of certain skilled individuals within the household.

In the story of medieval Icelanders and their animals, we could do no better than to start at the beginning. The settlement of Iceland is, both materially and textually, an embodiment of human and animal relations with a new land. To properly begin to understand the ideas around and practicalities of settlement, we must consider both archaeological remains and theories, as well as later textual narratives about these settlement processes. This chapter focusses on the presentation and use of animals and space in material and literary narratives of the settlement of Iceland. Out of this drawing together of multidisciplinary sources and methods, the idea of the settlement of Iceland as a co-settlement emerges: a settlement reliant on mutual care and cooperation, and the apparent mediatory role of animals between humans and their new land.

Domestic animals in Iceland occupy a distinctive place in the settlement of the island. While the island was not empty when settlers arrived in the ninth century, having pre-existing populations of arctic fox and migratory birds, all domestic animals in Viking-Age Iceland were brought over by migrants and required to work alongside their human partners in co-settling the landscape. The physical presence of domestic animals in the Icelandic landscape was therefore part of the Iceland constructed by these settlers and re-created by medieval writers. By building farms and boundaries, clearing land, and naming places, the settlers created homelands out of the Icelandic environment, and wrote the terms of their society: terms in which domestic animals played a formative part.

How to Access the Settlement?

A multitude of narratives exist surrounding the settlement of Iceland, with previous scholarly debates having been dominated by those narratives found in Old Norse-Icelandic written sources, especially Íslendingabók (the Book of the Icelanders) and Landnámabók (the Book of Settlements), and archaeological methods have been used to confirm these narratives. In recent decades, however, archaeologists studying settlement-era Iceland have questioned the dominance of medieval texts in shaping our views and, as a result, competing narratives of settlement have emerged, relying on detailed and extensive archaeological investigation. For example, some theories rely on intensive and organised ferrying of migrants to Iceland to set up farms from the earliest stages of settlement, while some emphasise the early actions of walrus-hunters in the region.

This book opened with a horse making himself known to a man, and the man responding. In this case, it was a specific example from a specific saga, but such an action and response, such an act of apparent interspecies understanding brought forth from learning, can rest as a metaphor for the ways in which animal-human relations are depicted in this book, and beyond. The animal-human interactions seen in the settlement narratives, organisation of farm sites, laws, and Íslendingasögur are reactions to the affective agency of animals in the early Icelandic world; our study and translation of them a further reaction to these co-creators.

This book examined the various representations of domestic animals and their interactions with humans in relation to the establishment and continuation of early Icelandic communities, focussed on the central space of the household-farm. It has done so through analysis and discussion of selected texts, and features of the built environment of Iceland, focussing on the organisation and demarcation of human and animal places in these sources, and the animal-human relations that would have informed, and been informed by, these constructions of cultural space. The findings of the chapters are as follows:

1. Settlement spaces matter

Both medieval texts and interpretations of archaeological material indicate that the settlement of Iceland involved close interactions between domestic animals, humans, and the environment, albeit to different degrees. In all cases, the locations and manifestation of settlement (the construction of the farmstead) are shown to be spaces of multispecies dwelling, and negotiation of complex animal-human relationships. The settlement narratives compiled in the thirteenth century are particularly pertinent to the aim of this book, given that they show an active interest in encouraging the role of animals in settlement processes, and as mediators between the new settlers and the land. It can be said then that part of the ideological framework of these settlement narratives was to develop ideas of a joint animal-human settlement, which seems likewise utilised in certain sagas focussed on specific families or individuals. The depiction of the management of, or cooperation with, animals as a process concurrent to the setting up of the farm would have had little relevance or interest to medieval society in Iceland unless these narratives were representative of a contemporary collective view of the importance of domestic animals in shaping the Icelandic community.

Richard Barber

Excavations

The account of the medieval castle in Chapter 3 contains very little about its archaeology. The simple reason for this is that there have been relatively few excavations overall, and only one exploratory dig at the top of the mound. Most of the archaeological material is the result of excavations for other purposes, and the relatively few finds are mostly chance discoveries. What follows is a chronological summary of the recorded results of archaeological excavations and of geophysical surveys. There is more information as to the intended purpose of digs and surveys in the actual reports. The discussions and conclusions of the reports have been omitted, as the evidence from these operations is already reflected in the main body of this book.

In 1724, William Stukeley, in his Itinerarium Curiosam, is the first to offer a brief note on any found objects from the site, which he regarded as that of a Roman castrum called Cunetio. He saw a large copper coin of the emperor Titus, and was sure that the boundary of the earl of Hertford’s garden was one angle of the castrum ‘left very manifestly, the rampart and the ditch entire’. He marked the plan of the Roman fort on one of his illustrations and wrote: ‘I suppose it to have been 500 Roman feet square.’ The ditch and rampart were in fact those of the medieval castle; the site of Cunetio was discovered at Mildenhall in the nineteenth century.

The first reports of finds relate to building work on the site of the castle. In 1892, work near the laundry close to the mound did not produce anything medieval; nor did work in 1912 when a chimney was cut up the side of the mound for a water pump engine at the foot. In 1915, an excavation of the castle foundations started

at a point about 60 feet due South of the Mound. On the second day they struck a flint foundation running approximately East and West; this was followed westwards and signs of a wall turning to the South were found.

In the Winter Term, the operations were continued by following up the foundation eastwards, and by digging a trench towards the Mound between it and the original excavation.