Chieftains gave gifts and persuaded warriors to follow them. Together with their warriors, they sailed and rowed to the European continent and to the British Isles to raid and plunder, so as to be able to give more gifts. Some of them were better at their jobs or had more luck than others, who were knocked out of competition, so over time there were fewer and fewer chieftains with larger and larger followings. We discern a hint of this process when the European writers who chronicled the Viking raids on Europe tell us that the raiding parties became ever larger and larger. The disappearance of chieftains’ halls in Scandinavia, which we can study through archeological surveys, tells the same story from a different perspective.21 The chieftains became fewer and fewer, meaning that the remaining ones each had more power. The distinctions among chieftains, petty kings, and kings are not very well defined, but at some point during the Viking Age, it becomes appropriate to talk about kings rather than chieftains. These kings met new and different challenges from those faced by their chieftain forebears. Their power over people extended so far that they could no longer maintain the kind of personal friendships that the gift economy of previous centuries promoted. Instead, they needed military and administrative structures to run what increasingly looked like older European kingdoms. The Church was the best organized institution in Europe at the time, and kings received help from clerics to build up their royal administration. Chieftaincy based on charisma and friendships yielded to organized and administrative kingship, although for a long time both “systems” existed in parallel.