 Okay, I'm going to give a paper on some of the Scandinavian cities in Western Scandinavia, or towns rather than cities. So I will look at some of the royal towns and some of the factors that made them successful. So by the end of the Middle Ages there were about 16 towns only in Norway and compared to more than 100 in Denmark and 40 to 50 in Sweden. So while previous research on urbanization in Scandinavia has focused on the role of the king and the church as both founders and developers of towns, less attention has been directed towards, let me say, local, economic and legal judicial preconditions and ramifications for this development. So I will try to give some examples, one example of pre-urban ownership around one of these royal towns and I will also discuss rural assembly functions taking place within the towns. So I will focus on Norway. So this is mainly a rural society and compared to Europe, the degree of urbanization in Scandinavia was low, particularly in Norway. But during the Viking Age separate trade laws, what we call Bjarke-Vettel developed and towns became separated from the rural jurisdiction and they obtained their own laws and courts and disdefined the urban space then. And beyond the town boundary what is named Tark-Mark, the rural law applied. So around 1200 there were approximately 50,000 farms in Norway, perhaps around 400,000 people and only 5% of the population lived in towns, that is approximately 20,000 people in total, 10 to 16 towns. So this is the rural settlement structure and what we see on this map is the main, the most important royal centers for the rural centers for the governance of this landscape. And some of these towns developed close to these royal menace and I will show that in a minute. So around 1150 the coastal land of Norway was described as the Kapolis, an area with around 10 towns. And we see the name of the towns here. Of course this term the Kapolis is also a biblical reference to kind of a Christian civilizing power. So the numbers should probably not be taken too literally. We find very close connections with royal menace or kings with these red marked towns here. We have also some good arguments that the Bishop towns were built on granted royal land in two cases. And we have also royal menace close to these minor towns up in the Northwest. So around in the beginning of the 11th century it looks like the Norwegian king had a relatively stronger grip on trade and towns compared to the European counterparts. If you compare to Denmark around 1230, only 20 of the around 100 towns where had royal overlordship or where Bona so-called regalia towns then. But in Norway approximately 60 to 80% of the towns were more directly connected to the king. So I will look at both assembly functions. I will look at, as I said, pre-urban ownership around some of these towns. So what is an assembly cycle? Let's just start with that very briefly. Thing meetings to resolve legal disputes mainly. You come together from various landscapes, vast big landscapes. You can have up to 400 delegates meeting on the main rural assemblies. But we also have kind of political meetings of judicial character. Like, for instance, in operation sites where kings are taken and comes kings. And also various places where negotiation between the population represented by the thing institution and the king took place. So this is from Iceland, the old thing. This is a contemporary drawing from rather late. What we see here is a thing meeting where delegates comes in, they live in small tents and so on. So this is how we could imagine these legal assembly sites then. If we look for these rural assembly sites, close or in the towns, we find quite many of these actually among the Norwegian towns. We have the Lore thing, which is a boger thing, which is located within the town of Borg. We have a half shire thing close to Oslo. That is, we have very little information, archaeological information about these sites. Only two of the sites, which I will show you. We have some archaeological information. We have different sorts of assemblies in operation sites close to Tonsberg. I will show that in particular. And Lore things close to Cheen, in Cheen and so on. Some of these might predate towns, while others are probably moved to the towns in their initial phase. So that is what I'm going to look at. I will give you an example now. I start with the earliest town in Norway, the Körpang town. And we shall look in the area around Körpang. We find this really huge cooking pit site. This is the site of Körpang. Here we have this huge living farm, which is kind of a royal farm. And we have a great church up there. And here we have this really, really huge cooking pit site, which dates from 400 BC to around 680. So it's actually a little bit colder than the Körpang site. But we believe it's a perfect close-up. What you see here is graves, mounds, and this is the cooking pits. Like this here you can see it from the geophysics. And this is how they look. So this is a site where people stayed and prepared food, probably then during the assembly that was taking place here. And we have also a later recon sources confirming that this was a thin site. When we look at the location of this site, we will see that it is very central to three shires, which we believe were the main, the law area before this granite area was integrated in the law area and into the Norwegian realm. So this Körpang slash Chölling, this cooking pit site, locates really central to this larger area. So then the idea is that this assembly site attracted people to the area and the town was established nearby the assembly site. Later we have the Borg site, which became the main rural site then for the whole law area, which now also was part of the rural area. And we see the early royal towns then they were connected to the shires. We get one town in each of the shires. And we also know that the rural assemblies for these shires were moved into the towns. We don't know the chronology of this is not known, but it looks like in the 11th, 12th century, at least, and we have written records from the 13th and 14th century. So we know that the shires' assemblies were moved into the towns. And we also know the time when these assemblies took place. And by moving the rural assemblies into the towns or close by, you attracted a lot of people to the towns at certain fixed times. And the question is whether these rural meetings then also became the market periods when you have markets in the town. That is a possibility. I will now give you another example with the Høgating, which is one of... It's the best preserved inauguration site in Norway. We know of six inaugurations where kings were taking kings. And this is the medieval town area. And we have the royal castle area here. And we have the large manner of same. That is one of the largest farms in present day Norway, the Jalsberg farm. That is 50 hectares or so. So it's a really huge farm. And then we have the Høgating up here. And we are going to look more closely at this site in a minute. But I will also just say some words about the property, the pre-urban property structure in this area. So the town is located here. So this is a compilation of all information we have on property structure in this area. And what we see is that the blue farms here, that is the royal land, while the red farms that belongs... And this is a big cluster of farms, nearly 50 farms, belonging to the St. Olaf's monastery in the town. And this is recorded in the late 14th century approximately. But the main argument for this being a pre-urban large royal estate is that none of the local churches, the other local churches within the town had any property within this cluster of the St. Olaf's monastery. So the idea is that this was granted land to the monastery from the king and that you had this big rural estate where the town was then established. So if we look at the Høgating itself, again we are up here. It locates right on the town boundary, which we know from the town law from 1276. You have a city or a town, I mean here. You have the execution site over here. It consists of two large mounds and we have also a minor mount down here. So we have tried to date this site. So was this site then established before or in the initial phase of the town? So we did just a small trench in it. And we got these datings from also human bones and animal bones found in the mount, around 950, we could say, dates. So we know from before that also the other mound is from the same period. So both these mounds that were really important in the ritual of taking kings on the border between the rural and the town jurisdiction were created then around the time we believe the town was established. So to conclude, understanding the development from central space to urban place we need a better understanding of the local economy and the legal precondition and ramifications of this development. Many of the successful Norwegian towns, they were founded at Royal Manus and the States, Niederhus, Lade, Bergen, Aleksdarr, Tönsberg, Søm, which we just saw, Usloaker are the most prominent examples. Töns, they had to attract rural people and part of the success was to create meeting sites for the rural population by moving legal assemblies into the towns or close to the towns. This may have created fixed meeting and market days in the town. The larger royal towns also had these inauguration sites and became kings close to the town borders. We have at least three examples of this. We saw the Høgatting, but it's the same case with Ayrgatting and Orko king and some of these inauguration sites developed to important weapon things as we can see in the case of Ayrgatting. I will go into that now. But in the case of Høgatting, we see the Viking monuments played an important part in the ritual of taking and negotiating with the king to have been created in the initial phase. So that's it.