Royce Perry wrote: > Thanks Norman. That's not too surprising actually. We tend to think > of people in that time period as being tied to one spot or the other. > For the ordinary people that was pretty much true. Unfortunately we > have very few (if any) records about the life of the ordinary folk. > Most of what we have (like the Sagas) only gives us an insight into > the life of the upper classes. And they were mobile to a very high > degree. Same is true across most cultural and geographic boundaries. > Ancient folks just got out and about the world a lot more than we > normally think they did. Especially in locals were they had access to > waterways or open seas. R At the back of my copy of the Orkneyinga Saga there's an index of the places mentioned during the narrative. Of course, most of them are in Orkney and Shetland or in Norway and Sweden, but some others are Constantinople, Crete, Durazzo (now in Albania), Edinburgh, Dublin, France, the Holy Land, Wales, Puglia in Italy, Rome, Saxony (in Germany), Gibraltar and Spain. These people certainly got around. I assume that ordinary folk would have been on these journeys too: after all, men would have been needed to crew the ships and to fight. (Let's not forget that traditional raping and pillaging too!) However, at a later date it seems that at least some of the inhabitants of Orkney became much less mobile. A paragraph from Maggie Fergusson's biography of George Mackay Brown: "Just before the First World War, an Edinburgh professor, Sir Thomas Clouston, had made a study of mental weakness in the Orkney parish of Harray in which he had been born and spent his childhood. Clouston concluded that though these were 'country people, decent folks for the most part, hard working, thrifty, few very poor, healthily money-loving' and 'strangers to vice in its grossest forms', excessive intermarriage over many generations was responsible for half the families in the parish betraying clear symptoms of idiocy, congenital imbecility, epilepsy, or what he termed 'ordinary unsoundness of mind'." However, I'm not aware that Harray is nowadays a particular hotspot for idiocy and congenital imbecility (though some, perhaps, might disagree)! I guess the available gene pool has been widened in various ways — by the advent of the bicycle and later of the motor car, for example, as well as by the influence of two World Wars and the increasing numbers of ferry-loupers*. Norman Tulloch *incomers to Orkney from elsewhere