Urban law in Scandinavia
Written laws first emerged in Scandinavia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These laws applied to larger jurisdictions, or legal provinces, and are therefore called �provincial laws’ today.
Designated town laws originated in the same period and were called Bærkoyar rettr or Bjarkeyjarréttr.39 The extant manuscripts of the Norwegian Bærkoyar rettr were dedicated to Niðaros, a royal town and the episcopal seat, but more general versions were valid in other towns and commercial sites.40 From the mid-thirteenth century, major legal reforms began in Norway, and in 1274, King Magnús Hákonson, nicknamed lagabætir (�the Lawmender’), issued the Norwegian Code of the Realm.41 This was a little earlier than the assumed date of origin of the Scottish Regiam Maiestatem and Quoniam Attachiamenta, which in contrast were not codifications.42 The king issued a separate Town Law for Bergen in 1276.43 Similar to how the Leges Burgorum constituted a national framework for the Scottish burghs, the new Town Law became a general law for Norwegian Towns during the fourteenth century. The new Town Law in the same manner was built on the old Bærkoyar rettr, which it replaced. However, whereas the Bærkoyar rettr is comparable with the compilation of burgh laws of the Scottish Leges Burgorum,44 the new Town Law was consciously constructed and published as part of the legal reform of the second half of the thirteenth century. Adapted versions of the new Town Law were introduced to the other three main towns of Niðaros, Tønsberg and Oslo within a few decades, and the law was generally distributed and in use among Norwegian towns throughout the fourteenth century.45 Little is known about how this process developed exactly, for example, how fast the Town Law was disseminated or to what degree the small towns made use of it. The Bærkoyar rettr itself stated that it was valid also in fishing stations and with regard to trading ventures.46 This claim was copied into the farmanna logh, a book regulating sea travel and trade that accompanied the new Town Law in many of the surviving manuscripts.Most of the surviving manuscripts of the new Town Law are copies of the version made for Bergen. Therefore, much of its known content was adapted to fit Bergen’s circumstances. In her analysis of two Niðaros manuscript versions of the Town Law, Grethe Blom suggested that, like Bergen, the main towns of Niðaros, Tønsberg and Oslo had already developed sufficient administrative power by the 1270s to be able to enforce the new Town Law.47 While this is true, few legal historians today adhere to such a distinct definition regarding the enforceability of written law. The current view is that the distribution of medieval law tended to be based on practicality rather than that a law was used only in the jurisdiction for which it was written. Towns were increasingly important hubs for tax administration and, of course, trade. The Crown took great interest in maintaining trade and trade privileges within the towns, as demonstrated by a legal amendment postdating the new Town Law.48 This Town Law, as well as the Code of the Realm, remained valid over the next three centuries, although the Dano-Norwegian administration increasingly struggled to understand the Old Norse language it was written in.49 Copies of these codes were still included in legal collections in the sixteenth century, and they were also excerpted in late medieval documents.50
The contents of the new Town Law in Norway did not deviate substantially from the Code of the Realm. In effect, the Norwegian Town Law followed the Code of the Realm while incorporating adjustments to account for an urban setting. Jørn �yrehagen Sunde estimates that 30–50 per cent of the contents of the Code of the Realm were changed, with the sections either adjusted or new, in the new Town Law.51 Only a few paragraphs (concerning, for instance, protection from fire) are not to be found in the earlier law at all.52 In comparison, according to linguist Bo Wendt, exactly 50 per cent of the paragraphs of the Swedish Town Law were parallel with the Swedish Code of the Realm and 50 per cent were exclusive to that corpus.53 As a product of the same administration that had produced the Norwegian Code of the Realm, similar influences can be seen to be at work in King Magnús’ new Town Law.
The members of the royal administration that formulated the Code of the Realm were educated within the context of the European intellectual legal school of law, and neo-Roman and canonical legal thought can be traced in the law of 1274.54 Nevertheless, the contents of the Code of the Realm, and therefore also the new Town Law, were adapted to local conditions.55All the same, when analysing how the law worked in the market towns, it is to be noted that the surviving evidence of law in practice rarely, if ever, cites the new Town Law, or any other law for that matter. On rare occasions, medieval Norwegian charters referred to actions being taken �according to custom’, using terms for �custom’ such as vane, sedhwane56 or �done legally’, making use of the Old Norse terms for �law’ (lagh or lof) or the more Danified versions (loug and lov).57 One of the few examples is from one of Norway’s larger towns, Oslo, where in 1498, peasants were fined �according to the law [lagh] of Norway as old custom [sedhwane] has been in this country’.58 A fine resolved this case, in which the peasants themselves had summoned the commoners for a town assembly (mót) without permission from the authorities. The lack of a direct reference to written law should be viewed as a matter of formulation and legal cultural language rather than as a lack of knowledge of the law or a refusal to use it. The use of law will be addressed in the following section.