The institution known as leiðangr (Old Norse), leidang (Norwegian), leding (Danish), ledung (Swedish), expeditio (Latin) or sometimes lething (English), was a form of conscription (mass levy) to organize coastal fleets for seasonal excursions and in defense of the realm typical for medieval Scandinavians and, later, a public levy of free farmers.
A Danish royal charter from 1085 stipulates that certain people on the lands of the canons of Lund are liable to pay fines for neglecting expeditio.
[6] The leiðangr was a system organizing a coastal fleet with the aim of defence, coerced trade, plunderings, and aggressive wars.
The ship's company agreed to serve for a certain period of time, normally, the fleet levy was on expeditions for two or three summer months.
The leiðangr differed from conventional feudalism in that the expeditions gathered around leaders based on military merit, rather than noble status.
Only a fraction of the ships called to the leiðangr would take part in the expeditions, but as they were often profitable, many prominent magnates and chieftains would vy for the opportunity to join.
[citation needed] At its most basic level, the system relied on each hemman or farm supplying one-armed man.
They were collectively responsible to build, maintain, equip and staff a leidangsskip (coastal defense ship), fully provisioned for two or three months.
If enemy forces attacked the country, fires (signal beacons) built on high hills would mobilize the farmers to the skipreide.
The smallest unit was the crew of peasants who had to arm and provide for one oarsman (hafnæ in Danish, hamna in Swedish, manngerð in Old Norse).
One attung seems to have been equal to the land area it took to feed an ordinary family (around 12 acres, see Hide (unit), Virgate and Oxgang for English equivalents).
Later 12th-13th century changes to this law code list more extensive equipment for the more affluent freemen, with helmet, mail hauberk, shield, spear and sword being what the well-to-do farmer or burgher must bring to war.
Each element of the system was meant to remedy defects in the West Saxon military establishment exposed by the Viking invasions.
If this entailed transforming the West Saxon fyrd from a sporadic levy of king's men and their retinues into a mounted standing army, so be it.
Characteristically, all of Alfred's innovations were firmly rooted in traditional West Saxon practice, drawing as they did on the three so-called ‘common burdens' of bridge work, fortress repair and service on the king's campaigns that all holders of bookland and royal loanland owed the Crown.
Where Alfred revealed his genius was in designing the field force and burhs to be parts of a coherent military system.
The historian David Sturdy has cautioned about regarding the fyrd as a precursor to a modern national army composed of all ranks of society, describing it as a "ridiculous fantasy":The persistent old belief that peasants and small farmers gathered to form a national army or fyrd is a strange delusion dreamt up by antiquarians in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries to justify universal military conscription.
[13]Henry I of England, the Anglo-Norman king who promised at his coronation to restore the laws of Edward the Confessor and who married a Scottish princess with West Saxon royal forebears, called up the fyrd to supplement his feudal levies, as an army of all England, as Orderic Vitalis reports, to counter the abortive invasions of his brother Robert Curthose, both in the summer of 1101 and in autumn 1102.