Iceland „For Rent“

Around the middle of the 14th century, the administration of Iceland was changed, in that royal agents began to lease the country from the Danish monarchy and themselves to make use of all its taxes and duties. Icelanders have long associated the third quarter of that century with these rental governors and have even linked this administrative arrangement to the country's struggle for independence and to various isolated events, such as the Battle of Grund in 1361. A closer examination of the sources on rented governorship, however, reveals that this conventional understanding was based on relatively few grounds, and thus it is risky to view rented governorship as developing from an older system in which the king's chief advisers and county magistrates accounted directly to him for the collection of taxes and debts. In fact, it is unlikely that rented governorship ever applied exclusively or that it disappeared when the chronicles stopped mentioning it; rather, it probably remained in existence over a long period, as an option to other means of rendering accounts. As for the Battle of Grund, there is no reason to relate it to rented representation of the monarch, because the original sources clearly viewed it in the context of conflicts among the different regions of Iceland, albeit probably more between those in power than among the general populace. The battle might conceivably be explained as one event in a fight for power between two or more groups of chieftains who were competing to represent the king.