They Did It in Medieval Iceland

Building the Island #4

I am frequently asked, Where has this crazy thing you’re advocating ever worked in the past? Then, when I provide examples from the past in which law, justice, security, and infrastructure were accomplished privately, the goalposts get moved: yeah, well that was in the past. What the interlocutor wants at that point is examples where “anarchism” has worked at scale in the modern era. It gets frustrating, but I also understand that anarchism is well outside most people’s Overton Window.

The reason large-scale modern examples do not exist is not because they cannot exist, but because the modern nation state completely dominates the scene, and has done so since about 1800.

The majority of Western nations followed the model established in Revolutionary France: obsessed with “democracy,” extremely nationalistic, centralizing, and totalizing. Gone were the days of duchies, small polities, and local allegiances. Everyone became a citizen of a single large state. Everyone’s identity became heavily rooted in that citizenship. When the country is at war, everyone in the country is at war with everyone in the enemy country.

In 1923, Mussolini summed up the ethos of fascism: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” In truth, this ethos is just a matter of style and degree of application. The modern nation state got that totalizing ball rolling long before Benito was born.

And yet…

Humans have not lived with such centralization for the majority of history, and Kulak recently argued, persuasively, that the people of Earth are moving back into a decentralizing phase. This phase is new; it is coming on the heels of the greatest centralization in human history, and there are many Davos types, and people in positions of power, who hate the idea of decentralism and are fighting tooth and nail to centralize control even further. Thus, while we are likely to see small-scale anarchic polities and areas rising over the next century,¹ it should come as no surprise that we didn’t see any over the last, and don’t see any at scale now.

When we are casting about for examples of “where this has worked in the past,” we are—shocker—required to look in the past. Obviously these will have functioned differently than we can expect them to function in the modern era. (For a vision of how modern versions might look, see Hoppe, D. Friedman, et al.) Also obviously, these will not have been “perfect” representations of anarcho-libertarian ideas, or perfect in any other way. Nothing is ever perfect.

Matthew Thompson recently reminded me of an example from the past: medieval Iceland. I knew that it had had some prototypical classical-liberal governance structures, but I was unaware of the private law and heavily decentralized aspects. Below is a description from David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom.

These people were not thinking, “Let’s apply the ideas of Rothbard, Hoppe, and Friedman in the real world.” They were just doing what came naturally to Vikings on an island in the tenth century.

Some of it worked well. Some of it did not. Just like today, in a world of states. Imagine that.

What Harald established was not merely a single monarchy over all of Norway, it was also a monarchy with considerably more power over the Norwegian populace than its predecessors. The change was not uniformly popular.Norwegians of the ninth century had two major professions — fanning and piracy. Many of those who disapproved of the change voted with their feet — or rather, their oars. They loaded their longships with their families, their retainers, and as much of their stock as would fit and sailed west; by some estimates as much as ten percent of the population left. Many of them went to Iceland, which had recently been discovered. That is the beginning of the history ofIceland, as the Icelanders tell it.

The settlement began, according to the Icelandic sources, about 870 ad. In 930 ad, the Icelanders held an assembly at which they agreed on a common legal system for the whole island. It was based on Norwegian legal traditions, with one major exception. The Icelanders decided they could do very well without a king.

The central figure in the Icelandic system was the chieftain. The Icelandic term was Go<3i, originally meaning a pagan priest; the first chieftains were apparently entrepreneurs among the settlers who built temples for the use of themselves and their neighbors and so became local leaders. The bundle of rights that made up being a chieftain was called a goðorð. A go<5or<3 was private property; it could be sold, lent, inherited. If you wanted to be a chieftain, you found one who was willing to sell his goðorð, and bought it from him. The term goðorð was also used for the group of men who followed a particular chieftain.

What were the rights that made up the position of being a chieftain? One, perhaps the most important, was the right to be the link by which ordinary people were attached to the legal system. If you wanted to sue someone, one of the first questions you had to ask was who his chieftain was. That would determine what court you ended up suing him in — justas, in the U.S. at present, the court you are sued in may be determined by what state you are a citizen of. Everyone had to be connected with a chieftain in order to be part of the legal system. But the link between the chieftain and his thingmen was a voluntary one — the chieftain, unlike a feudal lord, had no claim over his thingman’s land. The thingman was free to switch his allegiance to any chieftain willing to have him.

Other rights included in the goðorð were a vote in the legislature and a hand in picking the judges (by our standards jurymen — there were 36 on a court) who decided legal cases. The court system had several levels, starting at the thing court and going up through the quarter courts to the fifth court.

Under the legal system set up in 930, the ’government' of Iceland had one part-time employee. He was called the lawspeaker and was elected (by the inhabitants of one quarter, chosen by lot) for a three-year term. His job was to preside over the legislature, memorize the law, give legal advice, and, during the course of his three years, recite the entire law code aloud once. The recitation took place at the Allthing — an annual assembly, lasting two weeks, of people from all over Iceland. The Allthing was also where the legislature met and where cases in the four quartercourts and the fifth court were tried. At each Allthing the lawspeaker recited a third of the law. If he omitted something and nobody objected, that part of the law was out. Think of it as an early form of sunset legislation.

I have described the legislative and judicial branch of the government established by the Icelandic settlers but have omitted the executive. So did they. Aside from the lawspeaker there were no government employees.

You and I are Icelanders; the year is 1050 ad. You cut wood in my forest. I sue you. The court decides in my favor, and instructs you to pay ten ounces of silver as damages. You ignore the verdict. I go back to the court and present evidence that you have refused to abide by the verdict. The court declares you an outlaw. You have a few weeks to get out of Iceland. When that time is over, I can kill you with no legal consequences. If your friends try to defend you, they are violating the law and can in turn be sued.

One obvious objection to such a system is that someone sufficiently powerful — where power is measured by how many friends and relatives you have, how loyal they are, and how good they are at fighting — can defy the law with impunity, at least when dealing with less powerful individuals. The Icelandic system had a simple and elegant solution to that problem. A claim for damages was a piece of transferable property. If you had injured me and I was too weak to enforce my claim, I could sell or give it to someone stronger. It was then in his interest to enforce the claim in order both to collect the damages and to establish his own reputation for use in future conflicts.

The victim, in such a situation, gives up part or all of the damages, but he gets something more important in exchange— a demonstration that anyone who injures him will pay for it. The point is made in a more permanent sense if it is clear that the same person who enforced this claim would do so under similar circumstances again. The powerful individual who took over such claims and enforced them might be a chieftain acting for one of his thingmen or he might be merely a local farmer with a lot of friends; both patterns appear in the Icelandic sagas.

It may help to understand the legal institutions of medieval Iceland if we look at them as an extreme case of something familiar. Our own legal system has two kinds of law — civil and criminal. There is a sense in which civil law is enforced privately and criminal law publicly. If someone breaks your arm, you call a policeman; if someone breaks a window — or a contract — you call a lawyer. The lawyer in a civil case does, as an employee of the plaintiff, the same things that the district attorney would do as an employee of the state.

In medieval Iceland all law was civil. The victim was responsible for enforcing his claim, individually or with the assistance of others. The victim who transferred his claim to some more powerful individual in exchange for half what he was owed was like a plaintiff who agrees to split the damages with his lawyer instead of paying him a fee.

It could be argued that even if this provides a workable way of enforcing the law, it is unfair. Why should the victim of an aggressor have to give up part or all of the damages owed him in order to win his case? Perhaps it is unfair — but less so than the system under which we now live. Under our system, the victim of a civil offense, like the injuredIcelander, must pay the cost of proving his case, while the victim of a criminal offense gets no damages at all unless he files, and pays for, a parallel civil suit.

Because the Icelandic system relied entirely on private enforcement, it can be seen as a system of civil law expanded to include what we think of as criminal offenses. It is similar to our civil law in another sense as well. Under our system, the loser of a civil case typically, although not inevitably, ends up paying money damages to the winner; the loser of a criminal case typically ends up with a non-monetary payment, such as a jail term or, in extreme cases, execution. Under the Icelandic system the typical settlement was a cash payment to the victim or his heirs. The alternative, if you lost your case, was outlawry. The payment for killing someone was called wergeld — man gold.

Before assuming that such a punishment is obviously insufficient to deter crime, it is worth asking how large the payment was. My estimate is that the payment for killing an ordinary man was the equivalent of something between12.5 and 50 years of an ordinary man's wages; the analysis leading to that number is in an article of mine listed inAppendix 2. That is a considerably higher punishment than the average killer receives today, allowing for uncertain conviction and probable parole.

This era in Iceland was riven with fights over honor, and fighting in general. (They were Vikings, after all.) But the absence of perfection is not the point. The point is that private legal systems and decentralization can work for extended periods of time. It is straw-manning to say that anarchists claim that utopia is possible.

It is also dishonest to assert that the fate of some partial example from the past—Brehon Ireland, The Hanseatic League, Iceland, etc.—is proof that none of the concepts can work in the modern era. And continuing to assert, with dismissive surety, that no such system has ever worked or can ever work is just a continuation of the attitude that keeps us in chains.

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This is a job for me—one I cannot continue to do without support. Thank you for being here, and if you are able, please buy me a drink every now and then so I can keep this rolling!

I have no idea what those flags are, but I didn’t want to wrangle back and forth with ChaptGPT. Also, what the heck is that giant bird? A pterodactyl? A Carboniferous dragonfly? Whatever. Close enough.

1. Indeed, the process has already begun, with the arrival of Próspera, Ciudad Morazan, SEZs, Cheran, and numerous other small efforts. These will increase in size and scale as we move forward.