Growing up I always heard that the end of the Viking age came when the Norwegian forces lost the battle of Stamford bridge and never learnt about the societal differences that lead to the end of the Viking age.
the end of the Viking age came when the Norwegian forces lost the battle of Stamford bridge
"Viking Age" itself is a histriographical concept of periodization, with different definitions.
+++
As for the general decline (out-of-trend) of the raiding activity of the Scandinavians, however, scholars can propose some more contributing factors, though all of them are of highly hypothetical nature:
Taken these elements together, we can say that the main source of the ruling elites' power somehow shifted from the silver (either earned by the raid or the trade) to the more stable form of the wealth like the the extensive land use in course of the 11th to the 13th century, I suppose.
Note that the exact primary focus on individual researchers on the contributing factor(s) in fact varies. To give an example, Bagge compares the general circumstances of the 11th century Norway with emerging new polities in about contemporary East-Central Central Europe like Poland and Hungary. He suggests:
"..... [now] the only way for ambitious chieftains to gain wealth and power was within Scandinavia. In the case of Norway, this period coincided with large part of the aristocracy and the people rallying around indigenous kings who resisted Danish dominance (Bagge 2010: 35)."
His summary of the outline also states (Bagge 2010: 39):
+++
As for the continuing practice of raiding on now Christian pretext other than the Vikings, I suppose the case of King Sigurd the Jerusalem-Farer (d. 1130)'s Kalmar expedition in 1123 or 1124 was the most telling one. King Sigurd the Jerusalem-Farer of Norway, who had became also famous across Europe due to his crusade to the Holy Land from 1107 to 1111, led the expedition into Småland (now SE Sweden), originally planned as a joint expedition with King Niels of the Danes (d. 1134). Later saga author narrates his action as following:
"King Níkolás [Nils] sent word to King Sigurðr Jórsalafari (Jerusalem-Farer) and asked him to give him troops and every kind of support from his kingdom and go with King Níkolás east past Svíaveldi to Smálǫnd to Christianise people there, as those that lived there did not observe Christianity, though some had accepted Christianity. At this time widely in Svíaveldi many people were heathen and many poorly Christian.....[they= the Norwegian fleet] made their way after that east to the market town that is called Kalmarnar, and raided there and also on Smálǫnd, and exacted a payment in food from Smálǫnd, fifteen hundred cattle, and the Smálendingar accepted Christianity. After that King Sigurðr turned his army back and came into his kingdom with many very costly things and items of value that he had gained on this journey, and this expedition was known as the Kalmarnar expedition (Magnússona saga, Chap. 24. The translation is taken from: [Finlay & Faulkes trans. 2015: 161]).
+++
Concerning the land use during and after the alleged Viking Age, the development of the settlement archaeology and place name study in the late 20th century has offers main clues to us.
The settlement structure of Iron Age Scandinavia (including the Viking Age at its later phase) had not been stable, and the excavation of some settlements like Vorbasse (linked to the English introduction of the village) in central-southern Denmark (Jylland) shows repeated re-location of the buildings/ settlement around there. After the 11/12th centuries, however, medieval settlement (with the Romanesque church) formed and the settlement structure basically continued unchanged into modern period (Douglas Price 2015: 262-66, mainly based on Hvass 1983). This new village consisted of seven large farms of quite different sizes that suggests the hierarchization of power and wealth. The largest farm, also with the smithing workshop, could have about 100 domestic cows and horses, and was about twice as large as other farms in the settlement. In other words, post-Viking (Iron) Age lordship evolved around 1100 has determined the basic social order of the settlement since then.
The new settlement established in the 11th/12th centuries, however, is often located in hitherto un-occupied but suitable for arable farming (Sawyer & Sawyer 1993: 45). The historical place name can be a bit tricky (since they sometimes probably have first been confirmed in the documentary evidence more than a few centuries after it got the place name), but the smaller Scandinavian farms with suffixes like -garðr, -hus, -tun, -ruð, -reitr, -holt, -leið, -þorp, -kot, -brenna, -hagi, -gerði, often found in marginal locations, are often supposed to have been founded from the 11th century to the large-scale farm abandonment mainly caused by the Black Death. A scholar calculates that about 10,000 farmsteads with such names could have newly been founded in Norway by the beginning of the 14th century, and its amount indeed roughly corresponded with the half of the total farmsteads, especially in Eastern inland Norway (Moseng et al. 2007: 99).
References:
+++
(Edited): fixes typos, with uniform translation of moniker.