The solskifte system was a land tenure system that developed in the early middle ages, but was formalised in

Swedish law The law of Sweden is a civil law system, whose essence is manifested in its dependence on statutory law. Sweden's civil law tradition, as in the rest of Europe, is founded on classical Roman law, but on the German (rather than Napoleonic) model. ...

around 1350. Solskifte means ''sun division'' and is a way of allocating land within the community, such that each farmer get an equal access to the sun through the year. This was an important feature in a mountainous and northern nation like

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

. The system was exported with the Viking conquest to parts of England and Finland, where evidence of it remains in the modern landscape. In this method of tenure, a community was composed of a village and the surrounding lands. The village was divided into individual ''tofts'' (where the residences were built) and into fields where agriculture took place. As each field had different properties and grades of yield, the fields were divided into strips and distributed such that each family in the village received access to (usually) equivalent portion of good and bad fields.Petri Talviti
The open fields of Europe in their social and economic context: origins and use.
/ref> The village was then administered by a '' hallmoot'' court and the communities by-laws.

References

{{reflist History of agriculture Agriculture in Sweden Medieval Sweden