391 community seems to have been indisputable from the very beginning. In the juridical order of precedence to be found in the sources he is generally on a level with the eorl or the duke. In all probability, there were, in the earliest times, bishops in Sweden who were married. As to his administrative tasks the bishop was firmly tied to the administration of the country, practiced in the first place by the organization of the ting. Quite as the king, for example, he was depending on the decisions of the ting. The bishop’s way to the people went through the ting. This fact goes back to the adopting by the ting of the Christian cult for the nation or the province —and by that also in practice to the bishop as responsible for the practising of the cult in his district. The bishop had also certain cult functions to performat large law-meetings of the ting. In the first place, it was his duty at the meetings of the ting to make the demands and decrees, described by the law of the Church, part of the law of the province. At the tingmeetings he exerted, according to certain sources, control of his dependent priests. The prescriptions in the law of the Church which, by the bishop’s efforts, were taken into the law of the ting and the province, formed gradually special sections in the law, so-called Church codes.^ However, Church regulations are left also in certain other lawsections as a reminiscence of the time before the division into sections. Both at the noting down and at the revisions of the oldest law sources the bishop seems to have played a prominent role. Beside the law of the province and the beginning central legislation, also purely eccesiastical law sources began to grow up in the dioceses, as part of the efforts made by the Church organization to free itself from the administration of the community. The contents of these sources were both general and particularly legal, and had been taken from canon law, new writs, and not the least from the bishop’s own synodal meetings with the priests of the diocese. Taken as a stage in the fight for lihertas ecclcsicc, the existence of special law sources of the Church meant a long step on the way in the emancipation from the juridical administration of the province. Also the synods were gradually released fromthe connection with the provincial tingmeetings, which can be proved from the early Middle Ages. Now the regulations with reference to the law of the Church were not only a part of the law of the country, as a result of negotiations between the bishop and the ting. Special law sources and law institutes were created. ' The Swedish word for code is here balk.
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