Politically, Viking society was aristocratic, but an aristocracy in which all the nobles were equal. “We have no lord, we are all equal,” said Rollo’s men when asked who was their lord; and men thus minded were not likely to spend their time casting dice in King Harold’s court, even if their independence meant the wolf’s lot of exile. What kind of a political organization they were likely to form can be seen from two examples of the Viking age. One is Iceland, described by Lord Bryce[20] as “an almost unique instance of a community whose culture and creative power flourished independently of any favoring material conditions,”--that curiously decentralized and democratic commonwealth where the necessities of life created a government with judicial and legislative duties, while the feeling of equality and local independence prevented the government from acquiring any administrative or executive functions,--a community with “a great deal of law and no central executive, a great many courts and no authority to carry out their judgments.” The other example is Jomburg, that strange body of Jomvikings established in Pomerania, at the mouth of the Oder, and held by a military gild under the strictest discipline. Only men of undoubted bravery between the ages of eighteen and fifty were admitted to membership; no women were allowed in the castle, and no man could be absent from it for more than three days at a time. Members assumed the duty of mutual support and revenge, and plunder was to be distributed by lot. Neither of these types of Viking community was to be reproduced in Normandy, for both were the outgrowth of peculiar local conditions, and the Northmen were too adaptable to found states with a rubber-stamp. A loose half-state like Iceland could exist only where the absence of neighbors or previous inhabitants removed all danger of complications, whether domestic or foreign. A strict warrior gild like that of Jomburg could arise only in a fortress. Whatever form Viking society would take in Normandy was certain to be determined in large measure by local conditions; yet it might well contain elements found in the other societies--the Icelandic sense of equality and independence, and the military discipline of the Jomvikings set in the midst of their Wendish foes. And both of these elements are characteristic of the Norman state. Such, very briefly sketched, were the Northmen who came to Normandy. We have now to follow them in their new home.