222 What can be deduced from materials available in the three countries is the very concordance of the systems, originally called leidang in all the countries: the denomination of the teams, hamna, hamla and havne, skeppslag, skipreida and skipe, further the ship of 40 oars, the rotation system, the food-rations and the royal command. The absolute power that the laws depict the kings as having in the 12th and 13th centuries cannot, however, have been an original feature of the ledung, as the kings before that time had no means of forcing service in the fleet upon the peasants; accordingly, the war-ledung in its earliest phase must have been the result of voluntary efforts by the peasants. In what military expeditions the ledung fleet should be used at this early stage must have been discussed by the king and the peasants and if the king did not take into consideration the opinion of the peasants he was in trouble, as was the Danish king Knut Svensson (1080—86) when, in 1086, planning a ledung-expedition to England against the opinion of the peasants, he was brutally murdered by them in the cathedral of Odense. Only shortly after this in the early decades of the 12th century, the kings of Denmark, in close alliance with the church, succeeded in getting the upper hand over the peasants in questions concerning the use of the ledung and from then on we have the picture of the royal ledung fleet given in the Danish laws. The church was compensated by the reform brought about at this time of taxing the peasants with tithes. This changing of the Danish ledung into one of royal domination must indubitably have had its parallels in Sweden and Norway. The present writer has pointed to some facts indicating the possibility that the Danish ledung could have been organized in the middle of the 10th century by King Harald Gormsen (d. ca 986) together with the voluntary efforts of the peasants to ward off the Saxon conquest of the southern parts of Jutland in 934. The liberation of Jutland was brought about around 983 by the Danish King in alliance with the Norwegian Jarl Hakon. It was only the former Danish territory between the rivers Slien and Ejder, the latter bordering on Saxon territory, which was not formally restored to Denmark until about 1025. According to the Book of King Waldemar II, the acreage of the territories between Slien and Ejder were assessed, not in terms of the bol as the rest of Denmark, but in Hufe, the mansus institute of the Frankish kingdoms. This would indicate that the assessment of acreage in this province was originally made during the time when it was in Saxon possession and that no assessment in terms of the bol had ever been made there. The fact that the assessment in Hufe was not changed when the territories were restored to Denmark, would further indicate that the Hufe as a unit was identical with the Danish bol.
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