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History and Genealogy
of the Pearsall Family in England
and America:
Volume I
Front Cover
Inside Front Cover
The Motive
Thanks
Illustrations
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Appendix I
Volume II
Volume III
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Rollo Ganger
went afterwards over sea to the West to the Hebrides, or Sud¬reys: and at last farther west to Valland, where he plundered and subdued for himself a
great earldom, which he peopled with Northmen
from which that land is called Normandy. He was our ancestor and his
story will be told in the next chapter.
The remaining
son was Thorir.
When King Harold
was forty years of age many of his sons were well advanced and indeed
they all came early to strength and manhood. And now they began to take
it ill that the king would not give them any part of the kingdom, but put
earls into every district; for they thought earls were of inferior birth
to them. Then Halfdan Haleg
and Gudrod Ljome set
off one spring with a great force and came suddenly upon Earl Rognvald, Earl of More, and surrounded the house in which he was, and burnt him and sixty men in
it. Thereafter Halfdan took three longships and fitted them out, and sailed into the
West sea; but Gudrod set himself down in the land
which Rognvald formerly had. Now when King
Harold heard this he set out with a great force against Gudrod, who had no other way left but to surrender,
and he was sent to Agder. King Harold then set
Earl Rognvald's son Thorer
over More, and gave him his daughter Alof,
called Arbot, in marriage. Earl Thorer, called the Silent, got the same territory his
father-Earl Rognvald had possessed. No tears
need be shed or imprecations said concerning the manner of Rognvald's death, strategy as well as brutality, was
employed by the sea kings, according to which would best serve the ends
they had in view, and moreover he had himself employed the same means
when occasion seemed to demand it. He surprised and burnt the house in
which were King Jernund and ninety people, took
all their ships and all their goods at a place called Notsdal.
[Heimskringla, or The Chronicles of the Kings of Norway by
Snowe Sturlason.]
The Sagas give
the accounts of many such house burnings, and as the Saga only chronicles
the burnings in which the earls and chiefs were concerned, these were
probably a small percentage of the whole. A favorite amusement, and
sometimes a spiteful trick, among the youth in the north today is to go
to a cottage at night, fasten the doors, block the chimneys and thereby
give the in-mates a good smoking. In addition to the smoke of the
house-fires, other manufactured smoke of a disagreeable odour is plentifully blown into the house through any
convenient hole. This may be the modern offspring of the ancient burnings.
[Scottish Historical Magazine, vol. 12, page 178.]
Slaughter by
house-burnings was practised by all the
Scandinavian races, and by the Gaels in Ireland,
whence came many of the Norse settlers in Iceland. In old Norse law,
the technical legal term for slaughter by arson is brenna,
burning (e. g. 'Njals brenna')
or brenna ini, to
burn (one alive) in (one's house); an arson-murderer was called Brennu-madhr, burning's man, and when he was outlawed
he was termed brennu-vargr, 'burning's wolf,'
an incendiary. A legal action for burning was termed brennu-mal,
burning's process.
The Royal
brothers having slain Rognvald, one of them as
we have seen, appropriated the Earl's estate from which he was displaced
by Rognvald son of Thorir,
while the other of the king's sons, Halfdan Haleg, sailed away to the
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