388 cally, military and economically the community was built around the independent province and the ting.^ The position of the Church and the bishop in the decentralized Swedish community is a great and many-sided problem. This investigation faces the problemfromthe point of view of law history. The question may be simplified so that it refers to contrasts and points of connection in the relations between the canon law and the organization of the Church, and the building and function of the Old Swedish provincial community, concentrated to the bishop himself, his function and his position. The time concerned is the epoch fromthe earliest mission in Sweden till the ceasing of the sources reflecting the decentralized provincial community, which happens gradually from the end of the thirteenth century and the first part of the fourteenth. Even from the earliest times when the Church began its missionary work among the Teutons, the missionaries were attached to the various peoples, nations and tribes. There was no distinct difference between the missionary and the bishop. The missionaries became bishops for the peoples living within their territory. In this way the so-called leodbishopric (national bishopric) arose. In Old Scandinavian and AngloSaxon sources this missionary-bishop is called leod bishop, a bishop of the nation. The Teuton archbishoprics came to contain a group of national or provincial episcopates where the bishops became the suffragans of the archbishop. The bishopric and the people were from the beginning a unity. In this way the state of things has developed also in the Scandinavian countries. In the sources fromthe earliest times three kinds of bishops are mentioned: a) Bishops on temporary visit to Scandinavia, b) Bishops following the king, and c) Bishops endowed with the ordination of the Church for defined dioceses. Today we have got original documents, ordination letters, and narrating sources from the Church archives only in regard to the latter kind of bishops. For the rest they are mentioned only in narrative sources and in legends, secondhand sources without access to the original traces in regard to the ordination, the purpose and the territory of the bishop. Consequently, there is a fundamental difference as to the materials. ' The Swedish word ting h.is been kept as it has no real equivalent in English. A ting is the peasants and the free men within a certain r;>;g-district, e.g. a province, a hundred-district of a smaller district, assembled to a meeting for giving and taking of law, for jurisdictional and political affairs etc. Cf shire (shire court), hundred-district (hundred court) in England, and the word Dane Eaw, which is used about a Scandinavian t/wg-district in England during the early Middle Ages.
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