Concluding remarks
The cases examined here from Norway’s market towns only yield fragments of an existing legal culture; they only provide examples of laypeople encountering the law through cases they brought before officials or to which they were summoned, but do not clarify whether and how they might have come into contact with the law in other contexts.
Nevertheless, the examination of charters from the market towns has shed light on a lesser-known side of the medieval urban experience. This analysis has shown that there was no distinct urban legal culture in the Norwegian small towns, and that legal affairs in these towns are difficult to distinguish from the legal affairs of the surrounding province. The market towns functioned as judicial hubs for their areas without, it seems, any particular �urban’ tasks. The results demonstrate that the legal apparatus of the market town dealt with the same types of cases that the rural assemblies did and in many ways served as a substitute rural assembly. The market towns served as assembly places within a legal context, just as they were sites for administration and the distribution of goods. The royal policy of unification of the legal system seemingly led to a coordination, which meant that representatives of the authorities and those subjects interested in the services of the legal officials met in these urban locations.This study has revealed that people had knowledge of how to make use of the law and the possibilities that the legal system provided. Property transactions predominate in the source material, which is also mainly concerned with the legal activity of those at higher levels of society. Thus, to a large degree, what is revealed is the social elite’s knowledge of law and legal procedures. However, some transactions also provide insight into the legal behaviour of ordinary people, suggesting that they too had expectations for the use of the legal system for their own interest.
We have seen strong indications that the promulgation of the new Town Law had little direct impact on the use of law in Norwegian market towns. Still, as this study has revealed, the participants did abide by legal norms – it was just that these corresponded with those of the non-urban Code of the Realm. The legal culture of late medieval Norwegian market towns was furthermore grounded in the law in a conceptual way; that is, the legal practice worked from an idea of law and not necessarily from the written law itself.