Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/156

tioned in the Icelandic accounts was Arnold, who was ordained by the archbishop of Lund, in Scania, in 1121. The bishopric of Greenland was afterwards under the archbishop of Drontheim; and Alf, or Alfus, who is supposed to have died about 1378 in Greenland, is the last who is known to have officiated there. In 1389, Henry, according to Torfæus, was appointed bishop; and in 1406 Askil was appointed to succeed Henry, in case he was dead. But it does not appear, according to Torfæus, that either of them ever reached Greenland; but, since Torfæus's time, a document is said to have been discovered relative to a marriage settlement executed at Garda, the name of the town or episcopal seat in Greenland, by the last bishop, whose name was Endrede Andreasson, not Askil, three years later, viz. in 1409. In 1261, the Greenland settlements appear to have been regularly annexed to the crown of Norway by King Hakon Hakonson, who sent messengers to the people of Greenland; and in the submission which the messengers brought back, it was agreed "that all fines for murders, whether committed by Norwegian or Greenland people, on inhabited or uninhabited land, or even under the pole itself, should be paid to the king." The payments for murders, or other capital offences compounded for by mulcts to the king and relations, were then a considerable branch of the royal revenues. In 1388-9, Henry the bishop, on setting out for Greenland, received instructions to keep the king's revenues safely warehoused in a certain fixed place, those years in which no vessels came to Greenland; which shows that the communications with Iceland were not yearly or regular. A brief of Pope Nicholas V., in 1448, to the bishops of Skalholt and Holum in Iceland, states "that his beloved children dwelling in an island called Greenland, on the utmost verge of the ocean north of Norway, and who are under the archbishop of