Chapter 13

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had been made a jarl by Haakon and official representative of the king, for so greedy was this chief of power that he turned against his master, plotting to make himself supreme; but the Icelanders knew him for their own equal and among themselves decided that they would prefer to give allegiance to Haakon rather than to an upstart from their ranks. To the Althing came Gizur with an army of 1,440 men, intending to stake all upon the people's love of independence, but it was only to find that the popular temper had changed. At least, men said, Haakon could offer that which no Icelander, however powerful, could bestow, namely law and security and trade-privileges; so Gizur, accepting the now general desire for union with Norway, suddenly changed his plans and himself initiated the proposal that Haakon should be their king.
       Thus it came about that in the year 1262 Haakon and the Icelanders made a bond. For their part the Icelanders pledged themselves to grant to the king of Norway 'lands, thanes, and taxes in perpetuity' and to respect the authority of the king's jarl, or governor. On the king's part it was stipulated that he should allow the colonists to obey their own laws, that he should repeal the tax upon persons leaving Norway for Iceland and send at least six ships to the colony during each of the following summers, that he should accord special privileges to Icelanders when in their mother-country, that he should respect their claims, if any, as heirs to property in Norway, and, finally, that he should maintain peace for them in Iceland. Only the thingmen of southern and northern Iceland were present when this momentous decision was made, but by 1264 the whole of the country had offered submission to Norway on these terms and had acknowledged the king's sovereignty.
       This union of Iceland and Norway, though later history suggests that it may have been an imprudent step, was rendered almost inevitable by local conditions and did certainly bring about some temporary amelioration in domestic affairs, for the power of the overbearing Icelandic chieftain Gizur was restricted and an earnest endeavour was made by Haakon to establish order in the land; but Haakon himself died in the Orkneys in 1263 and it was his son, King Magnus Lagaböter (1263-1280), who initiated the greatest changes. For ignoring the stipulation of the Icelanders that they should retain their own legal code, in 1271 this great jurist submitted for the acceptance of the Althing a code drawn up by himself,         




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and ten years later, because this hastily constructed statute-book was far from perfect and obviously had been adopted in Iceland with considerable reluctance, he supplanted it by another, the Jónsbók, which was brought to Iceland in 1280. This was accepted by the Althing in 1281 and is a stern and noble document that not only threatened crime with punishments of salutary severity but also most profoundly affected the constitution of Iceland, for it broke the power of the godar and placed the business of government largely in the hands of state officials appointed by the king. The whole character of the Althing as a grand national assembly was thereby altered, and instead of a large and rowdy confabulation of the godar and their followers, henceforth a small body met under the guidance of the royal representatives to discharge the various legislative and judicial duties. And at last the government was provided with proper executive powers, for now the king lent the force of his own royal sanction to the laws that were propounded, and with the disappearance of the old office of law-speaker the monarch was left as the sole constitutional source both of law and of justice.
       Yet the union brought Iceland no lasting prosperity. For the power of Norway herself was already on the wane and inevitably the colony suffered in the slow eclipse of her mother-country The Norwegian government, as the years passed, became greedy and ineffective, the Norwegian Church more selfish and tyrannical, and, worst of all, shipping and merchant-enterprise rapidly declined so that the imports into Iceland were totally insufficient for the needs of the colonists. Once more the old violence of the jealous chiefs flamed forth and where there had been peace and order now there were brawls and bloodshed that the functionaries of the king dared neither interrupt nor punish. Then, to add to the distress of the unhappy colony, a series of horrible disasters, devastating volcano-eruptions, calamitous earthquakes, and deadly plagues took each a heavy toll of life.
       But worse was to come, for the union of the Scandinavian crowns in 1397 left the enfeebled state of Norway in the hands of distant kings of Danish or German family who had little interest in Icelandic affairs and neglected the colony except as a source of revenue; the result was that in this unhappy fifteenth century taxes were increased, trade with Iceland was further restricted by the royal monopoly, and gradually intercourse with Norway grew less and less frequent. Only the vigorous revival of trade with Britain, England especially, saved Iceland from economic ruin, and even this was hindered by the jealous




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Scandinavian government and was the source of constant friction between the loyalist Icelanders and the Englishmen.
       Here then the history of this viking colony, a gloomy tale until the brighter days of the nineteenth century, must stop, and it remains to note only a few landmarks such as the transference of Iceland to the Danish crown in 1814 as a result of the Treaty of Kiel, when the King of Denmark ceded Norway to Sweden but himself retained the colonial possessions of the ancient Norwegian kingdom. Another notable event was that the Althing, whose legislative power was now gone, met for the last time upon Thingvellir in 1798 and was abolished by the Danish government in 1800; but this ancient assembly, henceforth to meet in Reykjavik, was re-established as a parliament in 1843. Iceland received a new constitution upon the occasion of the millenary of its first colonization in 1874, and in 1918 the country became a free and sovereign state in union with the Danish realm and owing allegiance to the king of Iceland and Denmark.