221 the basis of the early mediaeval administrative systems of the Scandinavian countries. The money value of the acreage itself was fixed at the relation of 24: 1 to the value of the quantity of corn that was annually sown into the unit of acreage, giving the annual rent of 4 1/6 Vo on capital, invested in acreage. Thus the legal value of a Swedish attung and a Norwegian 6-sålding would have been 12 silver marks but of a Danish otting with 1/3 of its acreage fallow, 8 silver marks, an amount identical to 1 gold mark. The present writer has assumed that of the said value of one Danish otting, 8 silver marks, 3 marks may have represented the value of the acreage in itself and 5 marks the value of the annual revenue the cultivator could get out of the unit if properly cultivated. It is a wellknown fact that during the Middle Ages the church used to invest capital in acreage belonging to the peasants, and thus had land revenues, the so-called “holy rents”. The price payable for such a rent from one otting would then have been 3 silver marks, giving the investor a rent corresponding to 1/24 of the invested capital or 4 1/6 Vo, i.e. 30 pennies or 1 silver öre annually. There can be little doubt that 3 silver marks for one otting was the price the Swedish King Magnus Eriksson had to pay when in 1332 and 1341 he bought Skåne, Blekinge, the southern half of Halland and the island of Hven from the Danish King Waldemar Atterdag and other partowners of the Danish crown. The number of herreds which were the object of this bargain are given in the book of Waldemar II as 22 for Skåne, 3 for Blekinge and 4 for the southern half of Halland, 29 herreds in all. If the Danish herred, as supposed by the present writer, was assessed at 60 bols and accordingly at 480 ottings, the total figure of ottings ineluded in the bargain, would have been 13.920. With the price of one otting calculated at 3 marks, the total amount due to the Swedish king would have been 41.760 marks. In fact the sum for the purchase of the said parts of Danish territory in the documents is given as 42.000 silver marks, to be paid according to Cologne silver weight. Clearly this transaction makes conclusive the suppositions made by the present writer as far as the arithmetic of the Danish assessmentsystem is concerned: the herred of 60 bols was subdivided into 480 ottings. With respect to the period in which the ledung-systems of Scandinavia were established, the present writer shares the opinion of those Norwegian and Danish writers who point them out as being rather late institutions in these countries, originating in about the year 1000. There is, however, no reason what so ever to presume, that the ledung in the Svea parts of Sweden should have been put into operation more than half a millennium earlier than in Denmark and Norway, nor has the writer, who forwarded this theory, been able to support it with one single fact; such suppositions are pure guesswork.
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