ABANDONED FARMS, OR MEDIEVAL SUBTENANCIES? THE STATUS AND SPREAD OF SUBTENANCY IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The Jarðabók Árna Magnússonar og Páls Vídalíns, a historical register of all of the inhabited farms in Iceland, also includes records for a large number of deserted farms, although few studies have taken the latter into account. This article focuses on the origins and desertion of these farms and compares the Jarðabók records with modern archaeological ones. Furthermore, it poses the question as to whether these deserted farms could have been medieval subtenancies. Research into Icelandic subtenancies during the Middle Ages began in the twentieth century when the Jarðabók became available in print. Early scholarly ideas about the topic were not based on medieval sources, but were deductions based on eighteenth- and nineteenth century registers; the assumption was made that a subtenancy was a small farmstead that was sublet from another larger farm. Another assumption was that the peasantry on subtenancies had a similar social position as peasants who held full tenancies of their own. This was further clarified by a recent examination of the rich early eighteenth-century historical record, where a distinciton can be found be tween, on the one hand, subtenancies in rural areas that are similar to other larger rural farms in terms of livestock composition, economic status, social structure and culture; and, on the other hand, coastal subtenancies, mostly in the south and west, which generally supported only one or two cows but otherwise relied on fishing. A further observation was that few subtenancies were likely to have been inhabited after the plague in 1402–1404. Research on medieval sources has identified several mentions of sub ten an cies, especially in the fourteenth century, which supports the view that subtenancies did exist at that time. However, comparing the written accounts of tenancies to those of subtenancies is revealing: in many areas, fourteenth-century tenancy records are nearly exhaustive, while there is scant written evidence of subtenancies. Thousands of names of tenancies are listed in contemporaneous medieval sources compared to only a few dozen named subtenancies. Comparisons between the Jarðabók and archaeological records from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries shows, not surprisingly, that the Jarðabók register only accounts for about a third of the extant deserted farms. There are high numbers of abandoned farms through out the country, at the rate of about one for every two full tenancies or farms as surveyed in 1703; in eastern Iceland, the rate was higher, at about one deserted farm per tenancy. The deserted farms under scrutiny are farms with no evidence of settlement after 1500. Based on tephrochronological analysis of earthen walls at the farm stead ruins, most of these farms seem to have been inhabited after 1104. Farms in Svarfaðardalur, which are taken as examples of deserted farms across the country, appear to have had hayfields, earthen walls that protected the hayfield from grazing during the summer, and a full range of buildings, including a residence for the peasant family and shelters for cows and ewes. The size and layout of hayfields on medieval farms resembled those of hayfields on small farms as they appeared on early twentieth-century hayfield maps, which documented hayfields before the modernisation of Icelandic agriculture. The evidence suggests that the deserted farms from the Middle Ages were mostly rural subtenancies. They would have emerged as the Icelandic population grew during the medieval period, and they were probably preserved because after the Black Death in 1402–1404 the population never increased again to the extent that it became necessary to inhabit all the old farmsteads. The difference between the number of farms in the fourteenth century and in the seventeenth century in the areas analysed suggests that there was a 20% decrease in farms during this time.