Medieval Iceland Settlement

Does anyone know what the size and locations of medieval Iceland's towns/cities? Apparently Reykjavik is a fairly young settlement, so I'm not sure what the others were?
 
Pretty much, what Faeelin said. It was settled by, as best I can tell from my own reading, free held farms that dotted the landscape. I would suspect these would bunch up from time to time, and that there were areas with more people (and the prosperous farms might have had small communities of workers and such living near by) but there weren't any towns in the way we think of them until much later.
 
Pretty much, what Faeelin said. It was settled by, as best I can tell from my own reading, free held farms that dotted the landscape. I would suspect these would bunch up from time to time, and that there were areas with more people (and the prosperous farms might have had small communities of workers and such living near by) but there weren't any towns in the way we think of them until much later.
Huh, well that's interesting. I suppose they were just really scraping by and didn't have the excess most agricultural societies end up with? Just so different from North American settlement.
 
Huh, well that's interesting. I suppose they were just really scraping by and didn't have the excess most agricultural societies end up with? Just so different from North American settlement.

Well, different patterns of settlement, really. There's an argument to be made that with North American settlement, the early European outposts verged on starvation more than a few times, and had to cluster together.

Here it's a situation of free land everywhere, virgin soil resources, and no indigenous rival population occupying most of the territory.
 
Huh, well that's interesting. I suppose they were just really scraping by and didn't have the excess most agricultural societies end up with? Just so different from North American settlement.

It wasn't so much "just scraping by," it was just the normal mode of Scandinavian settlement in the north. They were an agricultural and dairy-based culture, spread out into homesteads with plenty of grazing land. "Towns" didn't pop up unless they were centers of trade or necessary for defense.
 
By the start of the 13th century the island had a population of ~50,000 and was divided up into 10-12 districts. Each having their own chieftain that were loosely connected.
 
By the start of the 13th century the island had a population of ~50,000 and was divided up into 10-12 districts. Each having their own chieftain that were loosely connected.

Interesting! Do you have any good English language sources on Iceland during the Middle Ages? I know I'm not the op, but I think it would be a fascinating topic!
 
The Icelanders in general had what we Danes calls "ladepladser", which are seasonal trading settlement/ports. Beside that there was two Catholic bishoprics with "capitals" at Skálholt and Hólar. Skálholt was the oldest and was by foreigners often seen as the Icelandic capital. When the Danish king converted the Icelander to Lutheranism both bishoprics was abolished and replaced with a single Lutheran one at Reykjavik. Of course this are only what I remember at the top of my head, I have to find my book on the Icelandic union era to be able to tell more.
 
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