Swedish medieval laws

’Hallandia Landæmærkæ’, kaldet Hallandslisten, blev sandsynligvis til i Valdemar II Sejrs regeringstid (1202-1241) og plausibelt i et dertil oprettet kancelli. Oplistning af grænsens landemærker fra syd mod nord, har været et stort og besværligt stykke forarbejde fra dansk side, før grænsens beskrivelse - og er udarbejdet i et kongeligt miljø plausibelt på kongsgårdene i Halland. Selvom nærværende analyses gennemgang viser en række sammenfald i grænseteksterne, kan afvigelserne snarere tolkes som, at den danske grænsetekst ’Hallandia Landæmærkæ’ ikke blev approberet fra svensk side.

The Older Law of Västergötland is the oldest surviving text in Old Swedish and marks the beginning of parchment manuscripts written in the vernacular in Sweden. As a result of its primary status, the law code has received a lot of attention in Sweden, but very little scholarship on the text has appeared outside of Sweden and practically nothing in English. The section of the law presented here in the original Old Swedish accompanied by an English translation comes from the most famous part of the law known as Rætløsæ bolkær (The Rightless Code), where the process of electing the Swedish king is discussed, as well as a passage that mentions the punishment for accusing someone of witchcraft. An annotated glossary of the Old Swedish text and detailed commentary on the translation is provided at the end.

The Medieval Girdle Book describes the now known twenty-six girdle books from the perspective of the hand bookbinder with details of the construction, techniques and materials used. It also includes research into each book's history and provenance. During the medieval period before garments had pockets, various small objects such as keys, pomanders, folded almanacs and miniature books were worn suspended from, or tucked under the belt, thus putting them always at the wearer's disposal. Monks, nuns, and other religious had to read their prayers several times during the day as directed by their orders, and since they often worked outdoors, and traveled between monasteries and convents or on missions and pilgrimages, it was important to have the prayer book, breviary or book of personal devotions always handy. To accommodate these needs the very practical construction of the girdle book developed and proved to be also a valuable format for legal texts used by advocates, lawyers and law clerks, riding the circuit to dispense the law – often in the open air and in difficult weather conditions. The little known girdle book format differs from other books by the extension of the leather covering from the lower edges of the boards, an extension sometimes measuring more than the height of the book. This extension may end in a knot, ring or hook by which it could be fastened to the belt where it hung upside down. Upon picking it up the writing, however, was in the direction in which it could be read without having to detach the book from the belt. If present, additional protective leather flaps on the upper and fore edges enclosed the book completely and protected it against sun, wind, rain, dust and insects. Girdle books were apparently made and used frequently between the mid-14 th to the mid-16 th century, as shown on many paintings, sculptures and drawings of the times, where they are represented with actual persons, but are most often used as symbols of learning, piety, or as the outward sign on the owner's elevated station in life. To date we have records of only twenty-six that remain in their original bindings, or at least retain the extension that sets them apart from regular books. It is thought, however, that many more may be housed, unrecognized, in libraries and other repositories. The ones still surviving were mainly produced in what is now Central and Northern Europe, with a preponderance of Germany, and Scandinavia. Twenty-three are held in museums and libraries in Europe, three are in the United States, however, their current locations are not necessarily the place where they were made. Illustrated with more than 270 photographs, most in color, taken by the author, and accompanied by images of medieval paintings, and sculptures that show contemporary uses of the girdle book.

Riikka Miettinen’s fine first book strikes a powerful blow to the ‘myth of early modern strong states’ (9). In legal historical circles, the early modern era is best known for its Judicial Revolution, which witnessed a transition from restorative justice administered locally and communally to a system based on retributive justice, imposed top-down by a centralized and bureaucratized state, and which employed an elite, university-educated judicature. What is at debate here is the extent to which this transition empowered the state and permitted control over its subjects and their values. While studies like Matthew Lockwood’s recent Conquest of Death: Violence and the Birth of the Modern English State1 see this transition as integral to the development of an authoritarian state controlling its population with an iron grip, Miettinen demonstrates the sheer impossibility of the ideal for the early modern Kingdom of Sweden. Not only was the kingdom sparsely populated, with 90% of its population living in isolated rural hamlets, it was a land of diversity. Including also Finland and Kexholm, the realm’s inhabitants were linguistically diverse (speaking Swedish, Finnish and Russian) and religiously diverse (Lutheran, eastern Orthodox and the animistic faith of the Sámi people). Miettinen uses the crime of suicide as a gateway to underscore just how local and communal justice continued to be during this crucial period.

The article discusses the understanding of the road as a collective duty and institutionalized public space in late medieval Finland and the Swedish realm, as presented in the legislation of King Magnus Erikssons’ law (landslag) of the late 1340s. After an introduction on the nature of past scholarship on the history of roads in Europe and Finland, the theoretical framework on the production and social implications of space on historical roads is discussed. The spatial understanding of the road in late medieval Finland is then studied in the context of medieval normative legislation, of which the main interest here is on King Magnus Eriksson’s law, which was the major medieval law code valid in Finland. In the code, issues concerning roads and their maintenance are distributed to various sections of the law, but the main body of the legislation is set in Bygningabalken and Edsöresbalken. The analysis shows that, in the bygningabalken, the road and facilities attached to it such as bridges were rather exclusively discussed in the context of common duty, where the word common seems to be inherently understood as something obliged and insisted by the crown. In the edsöresbalken instead, the spatial dimensions of the road were brought forward in the context of the sworn peace of the realm, where the judicial pace produced by the traveller was considered as a product of the road and the actual motives of travelling of the individual using it. The analysis of the respective chapters and decrees of the code shows that, from the point of normative legislation, the road was not only a recognizable space of its own but also constituted a judicial condition capable of producing distinctive social implications for those involved in the maintenance and use of roads in medieval Finland.