A man who settled upon a Herad without lawful right could be summarily ousted without resorting to legal remedies.
Thormod and Thorgeir made themselves obnoxious to the people of the neighbourhood by their wild habits. Those who thought themselves wronged by them went to Vermund (chief of the Herad), and laid their complaints before him. Vermund summoned Hávar and Bersi (the fathers of the two young men) to him, and told them that the people disliked their sons.
“‘Thou, Hávar,’ he said, ‘art a man not belonging to the herad, and hast settled here without permission. We did not object to thy living here till thy son Thorgeir caused dissension; we want thee to break up thy residence and depart from Isafjord; but Bersi and his son we will not drive away, for they are heradsmen’” (Fostbrœdra Saga).
Odal.—We find a great part of the land divided into Odal—i.e., the title to which was absolute, and not dependent on a superior—but how this was acquired we do not know. The probability is that in the beginning of the migration or conquest each head of a family took, or had allotted to him, a certain amount of land as odal—the extent of land being proportionate to the size of his family or to his rank. Then the settler became a buandi[[453]] (a dweller), that is, of the Herad of which he formed an integral part. The word bondi is still applied in Norway to odal men, who own farms in their own name. To this day there are odal farms in Sweden and Norway which have remained in the same family almost from time immemorial; and such were the safeguards in olden times against alienation of land, that it has been impossible for those estates to be gradually absorbed into the hands of comparatively few men, as has been unfortunately done in some other countries; and as no conquerors have come to dispossess the original owners, and give large tracts of land to their followers, the land in many parts of Scandinavia, with the exception of Denmark, has remained much divided to this day. Besides odal there was kaup land, the latter being freehold land that could be bought, and loose property.
The Gulathing’s Law enumerates seven ways in which landed property could become odal:—
“1. When it had descended through four generations in unbroken succession. 2. When the land had been given as weregild.[[454]] 3. When it had been got by so-called branderfd.
4. When it was received as heidlaun (fee-reward), i.e., when, in later times, it was given by a king to his servant for faithful services. 5. At a later period, when it was given by the king as drekkulaun (drink-reward), either for having been well entertained, or as a reward for nursing the king. 6. When it was received as reward for fostering a child (barnfóstrlaun). 7. When it had been acquired in exchange for another odal” (Gulathing’s Law, 270).
“The inheritance is called branderfd if a man receives another to keep him in bad and good circumstances, and feeds him till fire and pyre (until he dies)” (Gulath., 108).
In all the last six modes of acquiring the land, it is of course understood that the land must have been the odal of the grantor.
The odal could not be alienated from the family, and if sold to any one outside the family, the latter had the right of redemption, which consisted in this: that in case the land was sold to a stranger, the nearest of kin had the right to redeem the odal from the new owner within a certain time and on certain conditions. These differed in the different laws. The Gulathing’s Law, which most extensively treats this subject, sets as a rule for the redemption, that it could be made by the nearest of kin after lawful notice, on payment of a sum one-fifth less than that at which the land was appraised by arbitrators. The kinsman, however, in order to keep this right open, had to publicly announce it at the Thing under whose jurisdiction the land lay, within twenty years after the sale, so that twenty years should never be allowed to pass between two announcements. If this was neglected, the next of kin had not thereby lost his right of redemption, but he had to pay the full value of the land.