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Part I
INTRODUCTION
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INTRODUCTION
Helle Vogt and Ditlev Tamm
Denmark around 1200
The medieval kingdom of Denmark consisted of three major legal provinces or regions: Scania, in the east; Zealand in the middle; and the peninsula of Jutland (with the island of Funen) to the west. The long coastline and the many smaller but often heavily populated islands meant that the kingdom was bound together by waterways. Deep, impenetrable woods marked the border with the Swedes. In the south, the river Ejder marked the border with the Holy Roman Empire.
Each legal province had its own major provincial assembly, held in Lund for Scania, Ringsted for Zealand and Viborg for Jutland. These three provinces were subdivided into districts, each with its own district assembly. The assembly (thing in Old Danish; placitum or ius in Latin) functioned simultaneously as a court and as a multifunctional venue for discussion and determination of any number of communal concerns, including public announcements, publication of social status, settling of disputes, and the like. The major provincial assemblies also had a political function, serving as the place in which kings were elected, allegiance was sworn and new legislation approved by those present. An early twelfth-century source tells us that the provincial assembly in Viborg would gather regularly “to discuss and establish the truth or firmness of the laws”.1 Although the system apparently was based on the principles of equality and one man, one vote, we may suspect that the assemblies in many cases were dominated by local magnates or specific interests. The system of proof used in judicial matters did not necessarily further justice on truth-finding in a more ideal sense, but it may have been functional when it came to the necessary settlement of conflicts. With the increased power of the kings during the thirteenth century, the political functions of the provincial assemblies declined, and the forum for political deliberations and decisions moved from the assemblies to the yearly gathering of the magnates2 and to the king and his councils.
The Danish realm, as a union consisting of the three provinces of Scania, Zealand and Jutland, can be traced back to the early ninth century.3 From time to time during the following centuries, and as late as the civil wars of the 1150s, power was vested in more than one king at the same time. These kings did not claim sovereignty over all the Danes, but merely over one of the three provinces. Little is known about Danish feelings of identity at the time the laws were written down. Most people at that time probably saw themselves more as belonging to a specific locality than as Scanians, Zealanders or Jutes – not to mention Danes. We nevertheless find general references in the laws to Scanians, Zealanders or Jutes and, for that matter, Danes. Further insights can be gleaned from a contemporaneous work, the historian Saxo’s Gesta Danorum (The History of the Danes, c.1210).4 Saxo presents the Zealanders as brave, loyal and heroic, in contrast to the cowardly Jutes and the rebellious and ungrateful Scanians. With regional differences playing such a significant role in a work such as Saxo’s, which was intended to tell about the deeds of the Danes in general, one might well suppose that these differences were a contentious issue at the very beginning of the thirteenth century.
The picture of the Scanians as shifty and treacherous may be coloured by the rebellion in this province (1180–1182) directed against the king and the Archbishop of Lund, Absalon, who was Saxo’s Maecenas. It is not clear what provoked the rebellion, but it may have resulted from attempts by both the archbishop and the king via his officials to claim increased jurisdiction over spiritual and secular matters in the province. After the suppression of the rebellion, Scania was the province in Denmark that saw the most extensive legal activity, at least as far as the sparse source materials allow us to know. Although a number of royal ordinances concerning crimes are known only from Scania, we cannot know whether similar legislation was given to the other provinces or whether the extensive legal activity in Scania was due to special conditions in Scania such as the presence of the archbishop, or the perception that the province was more vexed with killings than the rest of the kingdom, as the ordinance from 1200 states. This ordinance, Knud VI’s Ordinance on Homicide (1200), was the most important element of the royal legislation from this period. Because this was given by the Danish king, one could argue that it was more centralized than specifically Scanian in its jurisdiction, although it seems that legislative reforms were carried out as a co-operative effort by the archbishop, the king, and the magnates who dominated the provincial assembly. In this context it is important to emphasize that both the magnates and the Church had property and interests in the other provinces as well, and thus the legal reforms cannot be seen as an exclusively Scanian project.
The provinces were divided into a number of districts (see Map 2). The term used for these, hæreth, probably comes from the word hær, which can mean both “army” and “people”, and rath, from “disposal” or “consent”. The division into districts in Scania dates back at least to the second half of the eleventh century. Districts are mentioned in a royal charter from 1085 by which King Knud IV (r.1080–1086; later canonized) donated land in a number of Scanian and Zealandic districts to the cathedral chapter of Lund.5 The rest of the realm was probably divided into districts at the same time, but it is only in the cadastre known as King Valdemar’s Survey from 1231 that we get a fuller picture of the districts in Denmark, which at that time numbered around 200.6 The division into districts gives some indication of population density. In the areas with fertile soil, districts were usually smaller in area than those in sparsely settled forest areas or other less populated areas. Most Danish districts bordered the coast or were at least connected to the sea by a major waterway. Each district consisted of one or more ship-sokes that were expected to present fully armed and crewed ships when military duty was called for. The districts may have their origin in a royal attempt to improve the military system and exert better control by means of tax payments.
By around the year 1200 royal officials were to be found all over the realm, and – in theory at least – in each district. Such officials are often mentioned in the laws. The role of the king’s official was to ensure that the king received his share of the fines to be paid, to ensure payment of labour and other dues to the king, and in some cases to help with the administration of justice. In Old Danish the official was called umbuthsman. In Erik’s Law in particular we find the word bryte (bailiff; Latin villicus) used synonymously with umbuthsman, which may indicate that the official managed a royal estate in the district. The word bryte, which is regularly found in the laws, was probably originally used for a farm manager. In the Law of Scania we find many provisions that bear on the private agreement between the farm owner and his bryte. There must have been a significant social difference between bailiffs with an official position as manager of the king’s or bishop’s estate with public functions and those who were merely farm managers, even if the latter were in charge of extensive lands.
The decades around 1200, when the laws were written down, was a period of internal peace. The rather stable political situation and general prosperity are reflected in the fact that, as in most of Europe, the population seemed to have increased dramatically in Denmark during the high Middle Ages. From an estimated population of around half a million in 1050, the population may have grown to around 1.3 million in the middle of the thirteenth century,7 a number which would be reached again only in the late eighteenth century. This population growth has been explained by such factors as favourable climatic conditions, low incidence of famine, new methods of cultivation and new technology, in addition to an expanding economy.8 The growing population placed a great deal of pressure on the arable land, which led to a wave of deforestation and cultivation of marginal land. As people began to run out of new land to cultivate, the existing land became an even more important resource, and from that came the need to regulate such matters as ownership, possession, borders and trespassing, as well as succession and such family relations as could imply transfer of land.
Note: The coloured parts in Jutland show the Jutlandic regions.
The politics of stable domestic conditions and close co-operation between the Church and the Crown came to an end after the death of Valdemar II in March 1241. At this time, fighting for the succession to the Crown among different royal lines started again. Valdemar’s immediate successor Erik IV (r.1241–1250) was killed, perhaps on the orders of his younger brother Abel (r.1250–1252). A powerful bloc supported Abel against Erik, who had been crowned as king and co-ruler in 1232, the same year in which Abel became Duke of Schleswig. Among Abel’s supporters were many magnates, including members of the influential Hvide family such as the Bishop of Roskilde, Nicholas Stigsen. The death of Erik IV was apparently seen by many of the Danish magnates as a way to gain peace and stability. They supported the oath given by Abel together with twenty-four oath-helpers to prove his innocence in the case raised for the murder of his brother, and elected him king. After Abel was killed in battle in 1252, the election of Erik and Abel’s younger brother Kristoffer (r.1252–1259) as king laid the foundation for struggles between the descendants of Kristoffer and those of Abel that lasted for the rest of the century.9 The last Danish king to be murdered was Erik V (r.1259–1286). The same period also witnessed a fierce struggle for power between the Crown and the archbishops of Lund. In this period all the earlier legislation was nostalgically referred to as “the Laws of King Valdemar”. The medieval laws survived the time of unrest and, unlike in Norway and Sweden, no unifying national law was given for either countryside or towns during the Middle Ages. The provincial laws were kept until they were partially incorporated into the Danish Code of 1683, by which the old division in provincial laws was abolished.
The Church
Denmark was Christianized in the second part of the tenth century.10 After a church organization was developed in the eleventh century, the influence of the Church reached a peak in around 1200. From the period when the laws were written down we can clearly see the influence of general theology and canon as well as Roman law; and several papal letters remind us of the close links between the Pope in Rome and leading members of the Danish clergy. Most of the cathedrals and medieval parish churches still standing today date from that period, bearing witness to a level of artistic taste and mastery comparable on a smaller scale to what is found in Western Europe at that time. Denmark was part of Latin Christian culture, and we can hardly understand the impact of the project of writing down the laws without considering the cultural European context.
Around 1060, during the reign of Svend Estridsen, Denmark was divided into nine dioceses. Five of them were in Jutland: Schleswig, Ribe, Viborg, Aarhus and Vestervig (later moved to Børglum). One was in Odense on the island of Funen and one in Roskilde in Ze...
