Like many Scottish towns, most Scandinavian medieval towns were small in terms of population, size and financial volume.1
In contrast with the majority of other continental and insular regions, the number of urban settlements was also few, particularly in Norway. Despite the relative lack of urbanisation in the middle ages, extensive scholarship exists on Norwegian urban politics and culture.2 What has been studied to a lesser degree are the subjects of towns as environments of legal activity and the legal culture that developed in these urban spaces.
Due to a lack of town records surviving from the central middle ages, and few and incomplete sources from the late middle ages, much of our knowledge of Norwegian urban life comes from archaeological work.3 Relevant studies have yielded information on spatial divisions within towns and the demarcations of urban and rural space – or rather, the lack of such demarcations. However, the legal space within the town has not yet been analysed, even if the extent of those legal boundaries has been a topic of discussion.4Following the definition of Jørn �yrehagen Sunde, this study mainly stays within the narrow sense of the concept of legal culture, which concentrates on how the law is expected to work.5 That focus is nevertheless not exclusive of legal culture in its wider sense, in which it is �more closely tied to other fields of society’.6 In the context of studying urban legal culture, this chapter seeks to explore how law worked in the smaller towns of Norway and to identify the expectations that inhabitants had of the legal system in these market towns. This is to understand more fully the urban element in the legal system of the Norwegian kingdom in a European context.
When discussing the impact of urban law, it is of interest to define the parameters of this law. In the European context, there was often a sharp distinction between the urban sphere – thus the jurisdiction of urban law – and the surrounding land.
The late medieval Norwegian town was not as distinct from its surroundings as most European towns with a twelfth-century genesis.7 The boundaries between the urban legal space, called takmark, and surrounding rural space may appear blurred to modern historians.8 Likewise, it would be overly simplistic to think that a town law clearly distinguished a town from its surroundings.9 Today, scholars are less receptive to the idea of clear-cut legal jurisdictions in the middle ages and more aware of how principles of accessibility and sensibility played a role in both the comprehension of law and the execution of justice. Legal boundaries were overlapping and fluid, and that should be our point of departure when trying to understand legal culture within Norwegian market towns.10After a code was issued for Norway in 1274 by King Magnús Hákonarson (1263–1280), a new Town Law was promulgated in 1276.11 The Town Law was originally designed for the major export town of Bergen, but it was gradually adapted for the other larger towns of Oslo, Niðaros (Trondheim) and Tønsberg. The status of this new law regarding its use in legal practice in other towns has not been studied in full. Understanding the impact of the new Town Law on the market towns requires a close reading of the arguments and resolutions in the surviving documents, which consist mainly of charters. The material that could be termed �case law’ is, however, neither systematic in terms of registering cases from town courts, nor abundant enough to permit anything more than suggestive conclusions to be drawn regarding the urban legal culture of either the market towns or Norwegian towns in general. Many of the known written documents relating to Norway in the middle ages have been transcribed and published in the continuing collection Diplomatarium Norvegicum (hereafter DN) instituted in 1847.12 This collection does not comprise town records as such, but relevant documents demonstrate how law worked in an urban context in Norway.
Although substantially more charters survive from 1300 onwards, written sources touching on medieval legal culture in general and Norwegian urban life in particular are still scarce. The material can at best offer glimpses into the legal culture that had developed in Norwegian urban settlements, but it can possibly also provide information as to whether an �urban’ legal culture can be said to have developed in parallel to a �rural’ legal culture.13 Around 1300, market towns like Vágar and Skien flourished (see below), but several of them had declined in importance by the early fifteenth century. The long fourteenth century has therefore been chosen as the scope for this study. In what follows, the legal charters from this period will be examined with particular regard to the participants in urban legal activity and the question of where legal proceedings took place within the market towns.