Helle Vogt

From tribute to taxpaying: the changes in the understanding of private property in Denmark circa 1000–1250

ABSTRACT The focus of the paper is about how the concept of property and the possession of land changed in Denmark from c. 1000 to 1250. Until the mid of the twelfth century, we are mostly depending of the archaeological material and the few narrative sources, and they give an impression of a system where various persons could have rights and claims to the same landed property – the farmer who cultivated it, the local lord who had a right to tribute, and his lord – the king. This system was challenged when the Church was established in the eleventh and twelfth century and started to get large donations. The Church claimed full property right the donated land, something that lead to conflicts, and one response was the introduction if written laws with firm rules about transfer of landed property and ownership. The introduction of firm rules did not mean that kinsmen stopped questioning donations or sales of land to ecclesiastical institutions in the thirteenth century, but rather that the conflicts were legalised

Introduction to Part Two

This second part of the book focuses on local disputes related to property, family, and micropolitical networks. It presents a quantitative survey of all Danish charters from the thirteenth century, with the aim of mapping basic patterns of property disputes in this period. This part then takes a closer look at the records from one particular monastery, exploring the variety of strategies employed by litigants in cases of local dispute processing in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Denmark. It also shows how Swedish magnates granted daughters as pious gifts to nunneries, and discusses how such gifts contributed to creating social bonds and symbolic capital that could be useful in dispute settlement and local power politics. This introductory chapter provides an outline of social structures and property relations in the Scandinavian kingdoms, the legal foundation, and the nature of the source evidence employed in all four articles: charters. Keywords: Danish charters; dispute settlement; fourteenth-century Denmark; microplitical networks; property disputes; Scandinavian kingdoms; Swedish magnates

Creating a Danish legal language: legal terminology in the medieval Law of Scania

In the decades after 1200 the kingdom of Denmark developed a corpus of provincial laws written in Danish for the three major legal provinces. With the legislation for the eastern province of Scania as a starting point, this article shows how the writing down of the law led not only to the creation of a legal language but to a written vernacular language in general. It was not until the fifteenth century that written Danish was found outside of texts; charters and narrative until that point had been written in Latin.

The conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, merchants, and missionaries in the remaking of Northern Europe

thermore, if truly extensive engagement between law and medicine in a national capacity has so far been underdeveloped in the academy then the issue has certainly been left wanting for additional engagement of a comparative nature (326). The extent to which the national readings given to law and legal structures as well as medicine and the apparatus of healthcare have grown up alongside and influenced one another (or not) all stand ready for this generation of legal historians and comparatists (to the extent that these things may be separated) to reveal the true nature of development here and thus come to a richer, better understanding of the basis for, and quality of, the current law. Medieval Europe may seem a strange place to begin to lay the foundations for such a study, but this volume demonstrates the error in assuming that the mere reach of time is enough to render irrelevant the problems created by and around the body. It is, after all, the most fixed of variables. A full, collected bibliography rounds off this volume and as such provides an excellent starting point for those researchers keen to pick up any of the many tantalizing research gauntlets thrown down in this impressive volume.

Finding, sharing and risk of loss: of whales, bees and other valuable finds in Iceland, Denmark and Norway

The focus of the paper is twofold: the first part is about how property rights were assigned and ranked in finds, both in those items such as bees, rings and other valuables which were previously owned, and also in those things, like whales, which were unowned. We focus on Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian laws from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, yet most of the provisions were copied into later laws and were in force up until modern times, some even current now. The second part treats the question of how risks of loss were handled, and how simple forms of insurance-like institutions arose, aggressively, to encourage risk spreading and overall risk lowering by sharing. The Icelandic laws, especially, show a rather remarkable sophistication regarding risk sharing. They were very alert to the kinds of strategies of avoidance people might employ to evade the rules.