The solskifte system was a

land tenure In Common law#History, common law systems, land tenure, from the French verb "" means "to hold", is the legal regime in which land "owned" by an individual is possessed by someone else who is said to "hold" the land, based on an agreement betw ...

system that developed in the

Early Middle Ages The Early Middle Ages (or early medieval period), sometimes controversially referred to as the Dark Ages (historiography), Dark Ages, is typically regarded by historians as lasting from the late 5th to the 10th century. They marked the start o ...

, but was formalised in Swedish law 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. The system was exported with the

Viking Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.Roesdahl, pp. 9� ...

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-law A by-law (bye-law, by(e)law, by(e) law), is a set of rules or law established by an organization or community so as to regulate itself, as allowed or provided for by some higher authority. The higher authority, generally a legislature or some othe ...

References

{{reflist History of agriculture in Sweden Medieval history of Sweden